I've heard lots of folks praise the original EHX16, but
can anyone tell me exactly why it is so praiseworthy? I mean, other
than the fact that Bill Frisell has one...
Sylvain
i had the eh16ddlri for a while a few yrs ago.
i'm sort of amazed that frisell and nels sort of say it was so bad.
i thought it was pretty amazing. the only thing i didn't like was the input something (that charles z explained to me that he told EH to fix, but the didn't)
something w/ the fact that the input of the device wouldn't accept a fuzz level input very well...it took a clean signal fine, but if the signal was clipping, it had trouble...
i think the thing that was so amazing about it was the fact that you had CONTROL over all the parameters, and they were VISUAL w/ the sliders...sure, i'm not sure the sliders were the best option, but they are better than NO OPTIONS, which is what the current day phrase samplers seem to be offering folks-NO CONTROL . which just frustrates me. of course i realize that nowadays the main loopers out there want to lay down a 2 min song riff and then play over that, which is not really what the EH16ddl is about...it comes from more of the delay based looping, it only had 16 sec originally (the RI offered more time, i think 4 min-which i never came close to using up). but the key thing it did was allowed you to reverse the loop, play over it, reverse it back, etc...which the boss rc20 units will allow you to do also, BUT, what the 16ddl ALSO has is: you can add modulation to it (chorus)-to muck up your loop, and then to add to the FUN, you can SLOW down the loop or speed it up, to really mess w/ the sound...it allowed you to manipulate the speed and pitch...which the nowadays phrase samplers DO NOT HAVE.
it was a great device. i should have kept mine. the thing is, i think EH could take their EH smmh device and make that something similar to the 16ddl and not make it cost a fortune, and just use KNOBS to control the parameters...but they've gone the route of the 2880 or whatever the new # is....that is why it was great. it was the device B frisell was using in the 90s before his digitech pds8000...when you heard him use backwards loops, that's it!
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