Care and Feeding of Your Korg Stage Echo - Part 1

About a month ago I sold my car as I hardly ever used it, and frankly, it was costing me more per month in parking, insurance, and occasional repair bills (mostly from things rusting up from lack of use) than it was worth. 12 years of car ownership had some good times, but also a hell of a lot of break downs, let downs, and general hassles. It feels good to be free.

Anyway, high on my "To Get" list for the studio for a long time has been a tape echo. Tape echo is an old effect, dating back to the 1940's, which by using multiple play heads and a long loop of tape, creates the illusion of space in a recording. A little bit of tape echo sounds like a reverberant tiled room, while at the other extreme you can get echoes and repeats building on top of each other, feeding back, and in general being really trippy. Lots of use in dub, as you might imagine, but having a tape echo was a bog standard studio feature for decades until analog and then digital delay effects units became more established and affordable.

There are still a few new tape echo units being produced, but the glory days were the 1970's when Roland created their Space Echo (I still regret not grabbing one about five years ago for 1/2 the price of what they sell for now). The lesser known entry into the tape echo wars was Korg with their Stage Echo models (manuals here) which came out in the late 1970's.

I have a great appreciation for the 1970's Korg design of their synths and other equipment.

There some thing about the colour, knobs, and general aesthetics that appeals to me, and the Stage Echo fits right in. So using some of the proceeds from the car sale I bought one.