New Music Gear Monday: Roland Space Echo RE-201 Plugin

Those of us who grew up with the original tape echo machines know how deeply their sound is imprinted on your brain. It’s a sound that you always tried to duplicate with modern hardware and plugin delays but could never quite get there. One of the reasons is that most try to improve on the original design, but the limitations are exactly why we love the sound so much. Here’s hoping that Roland has finally cracked the code with its new Space Echo RE-201 plugin.

Space Echo Overview

The Space Echo was one of the premier delay devices available when it was released in 1974 until it was discontinued in the late 80s. It’s three evenly-spaced heads produced a wider range of echo effects than typical single-head designs of the time, while a free-running tape system provided superior performance with minimal tape wear.

As a bonus, a spring reverb was also built in, but it was its grab-and-go controls that enabled quick access to single delays, different head combinations, and cool real-time effects like glitchy pitch shifts and intense self-oscillation that everyone loved.

The Controls

Just like on the hardware unit, the plugin has a large Selector control in the center that allows you to select any of 12 modes. The first 4 are different combinations of delay heads for delay effects. The next 7 are combinations of different delays combined with the spring reverb. The final selection is a reverb-only mode.

The delay also has Repeat Rate, Intensity and Echo Volume (Mix) controls, while the reverb has Bass, Treble and Reverb Volume controls.

Back in the day when you used the Space Echo as a gig machine, the tape might run for months and even years before it was replaced. Of course the sonic characteristics would change as the tape aged, and that was the sound that we locked into. On the plugin, a drop-down panel offers controls for adjusting the overall condition, tape wow and flutter, and even the motor torque, letting you dial in everything you remember about your vintage machine.

You can also get tweaky too, as there are Low Cut and High Cut filters, different signal path modes, different LFO types and controls for the wow and flutter emulation, and just about every parameter you need to dial in the sound you need.

There are also 59 different presets, sample rates up to 192kHz, multiple plugin formats and Mac/Windows compatibility.

As of now, the Space Echo RE-201 plugin is only available to Roland Cloud members, but it’s supposed to be released as a public plugin soon. You can find out more here, or watch the video below.

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