The circuitbenders Hate Echo is a delay pedal that can produce noise terrifying enough to make deaf people weep. Think of it as a Space Echo, but with 80% more HATE!
The Hate Echo is a PT2395 based delay built around a heavily tweaked circuit from a Danelectro Dan Echo delay pedal, but if you want a clean echo you’ve come to the wrong place. The Hate Echo can do cleaner delays than the Dan Echo ever could at shorter delay times, but there are far better pedals out there if clean delays are what you're looking for. The horrifying wall to wall noise terror is what we’re all here for!
CONTROLS:
The central EFFECT footswitch turns the main delay effect on and off, with the central LED lighting up when the effect is on, and changing colour depending on the setting of the TIME footswitch on the right.
The TIME footswitch allows you to select between two delay time ranges, short and long.
One weird feature from the Dan Echo that we haven’t tried to correct is that the extra delay memory used for the long time setting isn’t emptied and reset when you switch to short. This means that when you switch back to the long setting a large section of the resulting decaying delay will often consist of what was still left in the delay memory. This can be very useful for setting up very weird loops with the HOLD footswitch. Play into the pedal at long setting, switch to short setting and play something else, then press the HOLD switch and switch back to long setting. This should create a weird loop made from two disjointed sections of sound spliced together.
The HOLD footswitch on the left grabs and loops whatever is in the delay memory at the time. The HOLD effect is not deactivated by the main EFFECT footswitch, so you can set up a loop and then mute and unmute it with the EFFECT switch without releasing the loop. The HOLD switch loops the memory regardless of anything else you do, so you can still use the TIME footswitch, Reclocking controls, or normal delay time knob while the loop continues to go round. Deactivating the HOLD switch lets the delay decay away normally.
The Level, Feedback and Time knobs work like any normal delay pedal. 100% feedback is at around 3’o’clock on the knob, and anything past that will usually result in slowly rising and distorting delays that get louder and louder before disappearing in a mess of noise.
The HI-CUT knob cuts the top end frequencies from successive echos causing each repeat to become more muffled.
The Reclocking switch and Speed knob are home to some beautifully savage noise! The PT2395 is a digital delay controller chip which runs at a certain frequency set by the digital system clock. What the Reclocking switch does is to switch in a new variable system clock, with the clock speed set by the knob. As the clock speed is increased or decreased, the delay time also changes, but so does the audio quality. At higher than normal clock speeds the audio quality is actually better than normal, but as you lower the clock speed the delay time is extended by up to 15 seconds and the audio quality drops in direct relation to the delay length. At the bottom of the clock range the delays turn into a huge wall of glacial granular sample aliasing noise where you can hear every individual chunk of lo-fi audio splattering forth one by one. Setting a fast delay time, running a sound through it and activating the HOLD switch, then taking the clock speed down results in what can only be described as the soundtrack to the apocalypse as rolling walls of crunching noise tear your speaker cones to pieces! The effect is not destructive (at least not to the audio) so when you take the clock speed back up again your held loop will be perfectly intact. Theres filthy dirt, theres whizzing clock signals leaking into the audio path, theres digital aliasing, and theres some of the most beautifully nasty noise you’ll ever hear from a pedal.
One good trick is to set a long reclocked delay time, play something into the pedal with the feedback, and then just leave it to evolve. The clocked down delay repeats build and distort glacially slowly as different frequencies rise and fall into the wall of noise and are slowly crushed up against the distortion ceiling, until its all just washed away into a crumbling sea of digital destruction.
This is an effect specifically designed for walking off stage at the end of a set leaving your audience to bleed from the ears, but it can also come up with some beautifully haunted distortion loops.
Round the back theres a new mod that switches between the input signal always being sent into the delay regardless of whether the delay signal is audible, so when you turn the effect on you'll hear delays already happening from what you just played into the pedal (as on the Dan Echo), or the delay effect only starting from the moment you turn the effect on.
The pedal should be powered from a normal 9v pedal power supply. It will not run from batteries. The better quality the power supply is, the less clock noise will leak onto the audio path, so use the cleanest power supply you can find, if thats what you’re after.
