Bleak District Electric
Tapescape
Tapescape
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Dimensions
Dimensions
Waiting on Specs.
Specifications
Specifications
9V DC Center Negative
Couldn't load pickup availability
Magnetic Ambience Generator
The attic find you always dreamt of. Dusty, failing, broken. Beautiful.
Mix is the volume of the delayed repeats. Plenty of volume available should you wish to drown out your dry signal. Or with the 'Dry' toggle switch you can now kill your dry signal completely. Giving you acess to complete dry tape simulation or washed out ambiences. And everything in between.
Wow: Simulating the lower frequency fluctuations in pitch due to worn out mechanical parts of the tape machine. The wow control adds a slow and random pitch modulation to the delayed signal. From none through subtle and into complete malfunction. As an added variation, the randomness of the modulation can easily be set to a more predictable sine wave on an internal dip switch. This also gives you access to some more traditional chorus tones too. (Wow rate is adjustable internally should you feel the need)
Flutter (Failure) This controls the depth of the 'flutter'. Anticlockwise is less, clockwise is more. It also acts as a failure control, adding to the degredation of the repeats in certain settings.
Rate: Here we can control the rate of the flutter. Traditionally, flutter is the higher frequency modulation of the delayed signal. Again often caused ny mechanical faults in the machinery. Tapescape offers that but also many more variations using this rate control alongside the 'Type' toggle switch. From fast and random failure artifacts to long gentle swoops or classic tremolo repeats, there's lots to explore.
Swell: offers on the fly feedback ramping, to really use the pedal as part of your instrument. The orange knob lets you dial in the speed and intensity of the ramping. It is also interactive with the feedback control so this allows you to get the exact response you are after, regardless of the other settings.
Type The type of failure/modulation of the flutter.
Not sure what else to say other than this pedal is wonderful. I use it dialed back to add some tape warmth and dimension to my sound for the most part. But if you wanna get weird, it has everything you need. The ‘Swell’ function is also a cool feature if you want to oscillate people into madness. Bleak District 4 LYFE.
This pedal nails the tone and texture of tape delay better than any analog BBD circuit I've ever heard. The switchable low pass filter lets you eq the repeats to sit forward or backward in the mix, and the random wow and flutter modes add realism to the sound whether subtle or cranked up for a mangled, broken tape grit. I also appreciated that the swell ramping was not too aggressive and could be controlled to add some atmosphere without running away.
Why only 4 stars? Well, I found that if the feedback knob is up past 9:00, the pedal will go into self-oscillation even when it is bypassed. Somehow the circuit picks up a tiny amount of noise, which gets amplified and repeated through the buffered bypass output. The manufacturer confirmed that this was not a defect in the unit, but a behavior of the buffered bypass/trails functionality. This issue can be avoided by either: (1) running the pedal in true bypass, in which you lose the ability to have trails on; or (2) keeping the feedback knob lower than 9:00 at all times. For me and my use cases, neither is an ideal compromise, but for others it may not be a problem at all.
If you love everything about tape echo, but don’t want to spend ALL your money on an “always on” unit with actual tape then you have to get the Tapescape. The wobbles and warbles can range from buttery smooth to complete madness. Holding down the swell button adds a bit of chaos that every player should be adding to their arsenal. It’ll definitely turn heads.
I absolute love this pedal. It’s never leaving my board. Run, don’t walk to this pedal.