I've been having serious thoughts about this new machine and it bothers me that it has maybe come too late to have an impact on Shadows music as enjoyed for the past twenty odd years since the start of our community website that brought all the discussion and sharing of knowledge together and helped us all. Even if the new Echorec drum echo can sound close to the original sound, who will take it forward and benefit from it other than maybe Justin Daish and similar young lads who are keeping it going.
I'm in a group of guitarists from back then who are fast dwindling in numbers, I lost two friends this week, Cliff Fish who was bassist for Paper Lace and Ray Ashton, the lead guitarist of Bitter Suite. We all started together as kids in 1960 when we heard Apache and they were magical times.
All of that considered, I'm happy to own an original Meazzi Echomatic which can be temperamental, as well as the superb TVS3, each of which deliver the sound in spades. Even my Zoom G5n does a stirling job, directly through the PA, if you know how to set it up for the tone. It's that good that I ditched the very expensive Kemper Profiler last year after being delighted with it at first, but finding out that the Zoom could equal it in sound for my needs. I've bought and tried a plethora of pedals that do a great job, only to realise that Hank didn't have all of this stuff and his sound was the Strat, the Meazzi and his Vox amp. A bit of tweaking the EQ in the studio granted, but when I stripped it back and tried the old way myself, I found that it worked for me too. All it took was understanding what tones were tweaked and how - and it isn't necessarily turning up the controls, it's more about taking away to achieve the goal. So . . . . Do I need to spend £1500 + on a new version of an old machine to satisfy my curiosity ? Probably not.