But I'll have to say that the El Capistan is pretty friggin awesome. I've been biding my time...waiting on the craze to wane and used prices to drop down to *relatively* reasonable levels. The timing was right a couple days ago: saw one for an "acceptable" price and I also happened to have every penny ready to go in paypal. That never happens.
Got it today. After some tweaking and twisting of knobs (haha), I coaxed some sweet tones out of it. Got down into the second level of parameters and really dialed in what I was looking for. Didn't even know it had a spring reverb emulation built in. At first I was about to get all mad because when I hit the strings hard, the repeats had some soft clipping going on. Then I figured out I could adjust the "tape bias" and get rid of that...or dial in so much that the repeats sound like a fuzz pedal.
Obviously, I'm still in the honeymoon phase. But with delay, I usually know right away if it'll do what I want for the "core sound". This one does, and the extras are really nice as well. So I'll continue to experiment with it and see if can last longer than a few months on my board.
This is the most pleased I've been with my board EVAR. Only thing missing is a Big Muff (Ryan @ Dr. Scientist has my old favorite one), so I gotta build one up. And maybe some kind of FET-based heavy overdrive.
**********EDIT:
Here's a demo clip of the El Cap with the RRR:
http://www.archive.org/details/Strymon-ElCapistan-Demo
Clip details:
• Guitar is Agile AL-2000; neck pickup used throughout (GFS Fat PAF)
• Recorded: Guitar > El Cap > RRR > Line6 UX1 > Garage Band (using American Clean amp model, but no other effects)
• Reverberator settings: Mode P1, long setting
• El Cap settings: the whole clip is Fixed Head mode with 1/4-note division
To start, I have it thus: Time is about 500ms I think, Mix is around 12:00, Tape Age is 1:00, Repeats is 11:30, Wow & Flutter is 2:30, Reverb is off, Boost is set to 0db, Low End Contour is 12:00, Tape Bias is 5:00 (off), and finally Tape Crinkle is also 5:00 (off).
Then I goof around with the Flutter and Tape age a bit, and kick in some wicked oscillation. In about the fourth section, I turn off the RRR and use the built-in Spring Reverb at about 2:00. You'll definitely hear the drippy tones. Then I extend the delay to show how the flutter (modulation) is directly tied to delay time. Then in the last section, I make it all nasty and crank the flutter, tape age, and crinkle. Then at the very end I clean all up again.
I hope it's not too boring. And I really have just barely scratched the surface of what can be done with this bad-ass thing.
