News to you? What did you think these pedals are simulating? Its a can of oil in a big, bulky pedal. Or a can of toxic goop at any rate. Its not petroleum in there. That's safer than whatever morley used.... and these effects were sold like hotcakes to kids in the 60s! Gotta love vintage American enterprise.
I had some EDLs around and my buddy had an oil can wah. Typical morley opto-wah with an EDL stapled to it. The way they work is that the can is like a giant, fucked up capacitor where the "oil" acts as the dialectric. It passes your signal's voltage through but very poorly so it kinda delays your signal, but it doesn't delay cleanly across the frequency spectrum. Also I want to say there's a motor in one of the models that spins the oil making the sound warbly as well as delaying it.
Yes both effects are huge by today's standards. ABout the size of an Echoplex EP2 or WEM Copicat solid-state model tape delay but not as large as a Roland Space Echo or Chorus Echo (literally the largest effects unit I ever owned! Huge and heavy but glorious when it was working,which was rarely... I spent more time servicing the motors and untangling the tape than actually getting my echo on... every tie I would gig it I would have to test her, service her, and baby her into the van and venue... that was it for tape delay then though, It was rackmount studio delays/multiFX like the SDD3000, SPX90 (had one of those until recently), and the shitty Alesis stuff OR the boss DD3 type stomps and its cousins from other brands, a vintage BBD pedal like a DMM or DM2... OR you could get a tape delay and take care of her like a newborn... when I got that Roland I really don't think the line 6 DL4 was out yet, you wanted classic echo you had to dig up some crusty old MIJ pedals that cost a lot then because they were all discontinued or you shelled out for a questionable tape delay, found a supplier for the funky old tapes 'cuz the one it came with was invariably broken or worn out, and you brought her back to life and tried not to sneeze on her lest she stop working mid-song).
Oil cans were the bastard step-children and have only gained popularity amongst vintage nerds because tape units have become prohibitively expensive now that there are people making new tape cartridges for pretty much all of the different brands. Before the internet gearsplosion of the 2000s the cost was kept down because of unavailability of tape and no one would even look at a oil unit. Its a sound all its own though for what its worth. Its funny the digital nerds are cloning it now because it was really unpopular until very recently.
