Adrian Belew and Electro-Harmonix have teamed up to bring back the Echoflanger, a long out-of-production cult modulation pedal that Belew used to spectacular effect. That weird steel-drum-sounding guitar on Tom Tom Club’s Genius Of Love? That was the Echoflanger.
There were more sounds where that came from. The Echoflanger was not originally a Belew signature pedal but it might well have been.
This new limited edition release, which comes bundled with a card featuring artwork by Belew, comes complete with some new mods which were discovered when Belew played around with the original unit and found some unique sounds of his own: Slapback plus Filter Matrix, and Chorus plus Flange.
Who says the only “in-between sounds” are found on a Fender Stratocaster? Playing around with that original Echoflanger’s dials yielded some gold for Belew.
In the intro video, he recalls how he first met Electro-Harmonix founder Mike Matthews.
“One time he called me up, I was living in Champagne, Urbana, and he said, ‘I’m flying out to your place,’” says Belew, who was a little puzzled and asked Matthews why?
Matthews had a “couple of boxes of toys” he wanted to show him.
“He actually flew out there to Urbana, Illinois, and I had a little rehearsal place in the back of the music store,” continues Belew. “We went down there, brought these two boxes, linoleum floor, just sitting there. He starts pulling all these things, these boxes out, all these effects out, plugging them in different ways. We were like two little kids in a candy store. We had the best time doing that. Then he flew back to New York. That’s Mike Mathews.”
Belew has never been a player to barnacle himself to traditional electric guitar tones. He has always perched on the frontier in search of new sounds. The Echoflanger – and this redux version – is for the similarly minded. It’s not your garden variety chorus pedal.
Belew has had his in his rig since 1980, and yes, it performed as advertised. There was the Filter Matrix mode, the Flange, the Chorus, Slap Back too. But there was more.
“What I loved about it was that you could make it also do these really weird sounds that I started doing right off the bat with King Crimson,” says Belew.
EHX describes the Echoflanger reissue as “equal parts smooth operator and agent of chaos”. You’ve got a 6-way rotary dial to set the pedal’s mode. There are dials for Volume, Feedback, Rate, Width and Tune.
There’s a slider switch for the blend function, which can take away your dry signal in the Chorus and Flange modes for those super-queasy vibrato sounds. And there are stereo outputs. It’s true bypass, ships with an adapter, it’s priced $239, and it’s officially available now.
Find out more about the Adrian Belew Echoflanger at Electro-Harmonix.
