The Electra EP 350 vs. the Roland RE-301 and RE-501

Unfortunately, we've been sitting on two Electra EP 350 tape echoes as well as two Roland RE-201's as we're down to two people, one who is traveling abroad (thank god for Internet cafes in every country now) and another who is very sick. It's put a big dent on our hopes to restore the tape echoes we have and sell them.

We won't be putting the Roland RE-201's up on this site nor Ebay, since people do not seem to know a good deal when they see one. Once we get them working as best as possible for NM- condition (they're definitely not mint) we'll sell them locally as fortunately Portland has enough bands that have "made it big" (aka signed to major labels) that they'll pay top $$$ for one they see in a local shop and can play with.

But the Electra EP 350, which we want to talk about here, the local shop won't even carry. Turns out that a decade or more ago (we haven't pinned down an exact year yet) the Electra company was bought out by "Krate" (spelling?) who makes cheap, rip-off junk and has a bad reputation even amongst bad musicians (of which we count ourselves, so no insult intended.)

That said, we have no less than 10 people who're interested in buying the EP 350 tape echoes once one of us can get the time or energy to finish fixing them up. Minimum offer so far has been $600 for a fully-restored one. We noted one up for auction on Ebay that quoted from a piece we wrote about them, comparing them to the Roland RE-301 and RE-501 tape echoes, and we wanted to instead do a comparison, since we believe that if you're into tape echoes for more than the RE-201 "Stray Cats / Brian Setzer / Scotty Moore" slapback echo sound, all three have their own unique reasons for being amazing, and our hope is to sell off our extras but still have one of each (EP 350, RE-301, and RE-501) in our studio when we're done.

[More to come...]

The Sound-O-Mat Studio Update for July 2008

In the last year, or at least most of 2008, we've had problems here at the studio in that we've lost one partner / co-owner, another is one who tends to travel (which has really helped our Loop-O-Mat business by sending back native recordings from Asian countries, but it's left us with only one person, who was already responsible for all the accounting and such to also do the work.

Sadly, he's not been well, and is under diagnosis for a weird blood disease. As such, we've been sitting on some simple cleaning and adjustments for two NM- Roland RE-201 tape echoes and two Electra EP 350 echoes.

We've some good news in that we've got a (hopefully) mint NOS Roland RE-301 / RE-501 / SRE-555 replacement motor coming in, although it's not by Samyana / Pioneer which makes us suspicious of the manufacture, as well as possibly another Electra EP 350, which we'll discuss in a later posting. The problem is that the studio has one fairly sick (and potential fatally ill) person manning it at this time. Not great news, but at least an update.

Beck: The Information (10/10)

OK, up until last week, we (Wink, Rob, Wayne) hated Beck. Loathed him. Wanted to kick him in the nuts. Over-rated. Wouldn't have a record deal if Thurston Moore hadn't gotten a great blowjob from him. Another piece of crap musician Moore delivered to (then) Geffen (now Interscope, the ONLY label - that matters, and their best artists are fleeing like rates from a spaceship with an air-leak) - yeah, we could write paragraphs about The Ways In Which We Hate Beck Because He's a Talentless Fuck.

But his most recent CD "The Information", from 2007, with accompanying DVD... for $2 cash. Honestly, Wayne bought it figuring he could sell it for $10. Ha! Life loves to throw curve balls.

All three of us think this is the best CD we've heard in the last year. Really, it's that good. It's like he learned everything that was good on all his earlier CDs that other musicians made happen, and did it himself. This is his "Pet Sounds" or even the Beach Boys album that never was (Brian Wilson finally released it in 2005, but please.)

Great tunes, great lyrics, breaks into choruses or orchestra parts, a complete but seamless pastiche of hip-hop, love songs, Motown, 60's Summer of Love, samplicious funk, electronica, hints of trip-hop, glitch/IDM/whatever, electro, bad indie rock, crappy punk... the list is endless. Everything but ethnic musics, which right now are being so overly-used and mined and such that they suck. The one thing he passes on is the one thing that needs a pass.

And each song is basically part of each style with mostly abrupt switches to other styles that somehow never, ever fail, but make perfect sense. His hip-hop stuff makes Eminem and Puff Doody look bad, his rapping and singing and seriously...crooning, all work. And as said, he just suddenly shifts from one to the other and IT WORKS. In fact, IT KILLS.

If someone said a month ago "you will hear a Beck album and like it" - not even love it, like it, we'd have put $1000 each down on that bet. And lost. And wouldn't have cared. Yeah, it's that good. In a time when we feel like the end of music has finally come... Autechre took the electronic stuff as far as you could go, the two Hallucinogen albums are both the two most psychedelic and best produced CDs you'll ever hear, most sales are reissues and old turns who keep pushing on (Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen being two exceptions) - and Beck does the one thing left: he does nothing new, but somehow blends just about every type of music into songs that make up this album and it's just awesome.

Our guess is that this will fail badly, like all true masterpieces. His old fans will hate it because it's not the same old stuff they liked, and this is so far all over the map there's no way it'll gain new fans.

The only flaw is his need to give himself lots of "musical credit" - yeah, if he played sitar it's not like he knew what he was doing or you'll notice it, and "scratching"? Please. And listing "percussion" and "drums" and "drum effects" is stupid, as is "programming" and "programming effects" and "effects" and "drum effects". If there was a joke in there, anywhere, like Robert Rich's "glurp", it'd be funny, but it's not. So he's still way to serious to live, so someone please shoot him, esp. now that he's finally put out not only an album worth owning, but one that anyone who really appreciates music (read: Music Sluts) must own. Go get it, and get a rifle too while you're at it, and kill him before he Jumps The Shark.

Aligning Tape Echo Heads

Someone wrote the other day and asked:

"Could you please tell me how to properly align the heads?"

Here's our answer:

Do you have a tape loop with test tones (sine wave at various frequencies) and the ability to measure the output? That's the only way to do it correctly.

That said, the better answer is "Don't Panic!" Tape head alignment is highly over-rated on tape echoes.

On reel-to-reel and tape cassette recorders, it was important, since you wanted to make sure that what you recorded, say, four years ago, would play back and sound the same.

But since the tape loop is being written to over and over, if they're slightly off, it doesn't matter, since it's playing back what it just wrote < 1 minute ago. Make sense?

It takes about 15-20% variation off alignment before you start losing certain freq. ranges. And even then, given the units, there's already so much freq. loss which acts like compression and they have to get really bad before you'd notice the loss. We've had heads that were very out of alignment and they still passed the tests with the test tape loop.

If you still want to try, there's a trick using a laser level that you can at least make sure all the heads are aligned the same by lighting it across the heads. But if the one you chose to align the rest to and it's off, they'll all be off. That said, having them all identically mis-aligned will sound better than having them randomly misaligned. Not optimal, but close.