sustained bends and for tremolo-feathered
chord arpeggios.
In each of these contexts, the Psychoplex
displays a lot of genuinely tape-like characteristics. There’s a very organic presence
to this effect when you kick it on. And it’s
not at all antiseptic, though there’s still a
mechanical regularity to the repeats that
sounds more like an analog delay. You won’t
notice that if you’re inclined to aggressively
tinker with the repeats and level on the
fly. To send the Psychoplex into oscillating
feedback, you only have to move the Repeat
knob just past two o’clock and crank
the level up to about the same. Back the
Repeats down a bit and you’ll hit a sweet
spot where an almost reverb-like harmonic
echo will linger like a drone under a lead
or chord progression. It’s at these settings
that the more Echoplex-like characteristics
of the pedal come into play. Certainly, the
12AX7 is a major factor in this aspect of
the Psychoplex’s performance. And it seems
to not only play into the color of the tones
you get, but the more Echoplex-like reactiv-ity of the controls.
The Verdict
The bottom line: The Psychoplex is a
beautiful-sounding analog delay. And if
you’re a devotee of tape delay tones you’ll
be thrilled with what this thing can do—
particularly in slapback settings and more
radical tweaking where the clock-like analog repeats are less likely to betray the lack
of actual tape.
The most Echoplex-like aspects of
the Psychoplex are the way the onboard
12AX7 interacts with the circuit, the
pedal’s controls, your amplifier, and your
playing. That’s nothing to shake a stick
at, because even at its mellowest, the
Psychoplex can enliven an otherwise clean
tube amp tone in very cool ways that
are distinctly tube tape echo-like. In the
absence of tape, the Psychoplex is unlikely
to send nitpickers scrambling to sell their
EP-1s on eBay. But for most applications,
this pedal will get you about 80 percent
of the way to a truly authentic Echoplex
tone. And given how elusive that can be
we’re pretty impressed with what Orbit has
pulled off with the Psychoplex.
Buy If...
you don’t want to risk gigging with
your Echoplex anymore, but can’t
stand the thought of playing with a
dinky analog delay.
Skip If...
you like digital predictability and
compact pedal designs.
Orbit Electronix
Street $320
orbitelectronix.com
or use a mobile device to download
audio clips of the pedal at
CLICKHere…
premierguitar.com/jan2012
