Strymon El Capistan Reviews

Best delay ever

Best delay ever, using it for bass and synths.

Warm delay sound

Yes Strymon are expensive but the sound quality is fantastic. Secondary function of a Spring reverb is very useful. Also, sounds great as a standalone pedal.

Quite expensive for what it does

It sounds great, let's get that out of the way first. However, for the price there are better and more feature rich offerings (such as the Walrus Audio Mako D1). For the price, it's a bit disappointing.

The best tape echo emulation there is...

If you are looking for authentic tape echo emulation, look no further. I stopped using real tape echo after getting this.

Tremendous

Got this to replace my memory man. Beautiful lush delays, covers a lot of sonic territory, sound and build quality is terrific.

Recommended

Really nice tape delay, totally love the sound!

Nevertheless, it has a bit of room for improvement:

- Tapping the tempo will stop the delay sound. This is a bit annoying if I want to change or correct the tempo in the middle of a song

- As I mostly use it with synths, an option to sync via midi would also be useful

- Too bad it's not true stereo (as far as I know, if you use the stereo input option, the channels will get summed... correct me if I'm wrong)

The best tape delay emulation ever made

The best tape delay emulation ever made. I owned many genuine tape echoea. Sweet sounding but not reliable... When I bought the El Capistan I still had the Roland Echo Chorus RE-501 tape machine. The El Capistan was good enough to say bye to Roland.

A very good product with a remark

This product is for sure great in all aspects BUT...

The sound remains a bit cold overall in my opinion. Maybe it has to do with the internal eq of this pedal. I play mainly Jazz related music and the sound I am able to obtain so far is more fitting a more modern-jazz/ contemporary sound. It sounds good on my ES-335 in that context but on my hollow-body Sadowsky guitar it doesn't do favor to the guitar.

I have used several similar compatible pedals over the years and could somehow get a more warm sound out of them. I am still looking for that 'sweet spot' after 1 year and haven't found it yet.

I'd say that this is perfect for a studio musician. If you are looking to add some warmth to your personal sound, I'd compare this pedal with other products.

I rate it 5 stars because of it's 'perfection' but if I was the manufacturer, I'd look for some options to warm up the sound, to make it suitable for a wider range of guitars.

Hassle-free tape sounds

The Strymon produces convincing tape tones, but without all the hassle that comes with an actual tape machine.

I had basically narrowed my choices to this Strymon and the Catalinbread Belle Epoch Deluxe. I preferred El Capistan for two reasons. Firstly, the Strymon does NOT include an EP3-like preamp. For me this was an advantage, since it means that you can use a separate Echoplex to colour your sound even if the delay is off.

Secondly, the ability to shape the sound is amazing. The El Capistan can convincingly recreate a new, brighter tape or an old and darker tape. And with much less maintenance and more consistency than real tape. Add options to mimic an imperfect tape or dirty machine, and this pedal certainly doesn’t sound sterile or "digital". I’ve never used actual tape, but owning this, I don’t feel the need to try either.

The many knobs and settings do take some time to get used to, but Strymon provides a detailed manual with examples settings to help you get started and understand what each dial is used for and how they interact.

Best tape delay outside of the real thing!

I used to own a Roland RE-501 but sold it as I didn't want to deal with maintenance. I'd tried the BOSS RE-20 before but it wasn't convincing me, but this pedal has a real charm to it. The Wow an Flutter control is especially nice and the Spring Reverb, while hidden as a secondary function sounds good too. I love using this with my analog synths together with my BigSky.

Nearest tape delay you can buy.

If you want a tape delay there are a couple of options... the real deal or this. This is zero hassle. Tape is a nightmare. Believe me I had a Space Echo, a Watkins CopyCat and way back a unit that used a small 'cassette' type tape, who's name I can't remember, and probably just as well! It was dire.

With the El Capistan you can get some super lush sounds. All completely tailored to what you need. And no repairs or tape requirements. It is a joy.

I'm personally using it to feed into a Strymon Bluesky to get drifty ambient tones and sound on sound loops - a bit like Frippertronics.

The standard delays are great though and very versatile - but I am a fan of the long delays available with the sound on sound feature: up to 20 seconds before the repeats come back, slightly or radically degraded. Sweet and rocks my boat.

Overall, top quality product with no compromises in engineering. Solid. Gig worthy and ready.

Good Sound

This works pretty much as I expected. It sounds amazing a lot of the time. It can be a bit difficult to work out how it fully works as the secondary controls are hidden, and you need to look up details online to fully understand how to use all of the features. I don't own a real tape delay, so I don't really know how accurate the sound is, but I expect it gets pretty close.

I am using the pedal mainly with a Fender 57 Custom Champ (which does not have an FX loop) and I am satisfied with the overall sound created by the pedal. I encountered no issues with using the pedal in front of the amplifier. What I found very useful is the built-in spring reverb functionality of the pedal, which allows me to use only one pedal with my amp if I only intend to play clean.

The production quality is very good, as is usual for strymon.

The handling of the pedal can be learned very quickly.

I recommend the pedal to anyone who is looking for a vintage sounding tape echo pedal (with the basic options) that is easy to use.

Excellent tape delay

Great tape delay emulation by Strymon.

The pedal itself is sturdy, well built and audio quality is great, both the dry signal and the wet one.

It is immediate to use, control are self explaining and they're not too many, so you don't get confused and you don't spend all your time trying to figure it out instead of playing.

Switches are without "click", so it's perfect to be used with feet or with hands (for desktop applications).

The only small "cons" is having to use a split cable for stereo input, but there was no space left on the back for another input.

Very flexiable , good sounding delay and tapemachine box.

beautiful

has the typical Strymon sound. If you like that you'll love this pedal.

There are a lot of functions put into this compact pedal in a clever way and works very intuitive.

Sound quality is superb, no hiss or compromise on your guitar sound.

Using it on tour since 2013 very intensively. Had to replace once last year foot switch once, Strymon sent it to me very fast. Great service

Best of Both Worlds!

I have always been a fan of the 1960's tape and disk echoes. However, they are large, heavy and need a lot of upkeep. And I've always disliked the sound of digital delays, as they usually sound very too clean and clinical.

I love that the El Capistan has Tap-Tempo, and the pedal has a pretty small footprint, taking less space on my pedalboard. I also like that the most useful features are accessible right at your fingertips, and that the tweaking settings are easily accessed by the secondary functions.

If you are looking for a vintage sounded echo, with GOBS of MOJO, then this is your pedal. It has emulated the charm of a vintage tube-driven tape echo, with the size, reliability and price of a stomp box.

I give my new favourite pedal 5 Stars, as it ticks all the boxes. Don't settle for less!

delay elay lay ay y

What a great device this is. It does every thing it is supposed and more. It even has a reverb function! Quality is superb. Emulation of a tape delay is great if you consider the size it takes on your pedalboard. The only thing I would say i regret about buying this pice of gear is that i didn't have the guts to buy the big guy (timeline).

Perfect delay.

This is my favourite delay pedal out of all of which I have or previously had. Excellent sound & build. So many settings can give so many flavours.

The best pedal I've ever bought. Beautiful tape delay.

I couldn't be more satisfied with the El Capistan. It sounds like magic and tape and just absolutely beautiful. I love it.

The secondary controls are a bit hard to reach, as you need to press both footswitches at the same time and at first it's a little hard without bypassing the pedal or hitting tap and effectively ruining your ongoing delay in the process - it cuts the previous delay off and you start from silence (I wish there was an option to change the behaviour of the tap switch). BUT the secondary controls are well chosen in my opinion as most of the time I'm changing the primary controls only.

The reverb is also a nice little addition if you need to have a minimal setup. Not the best sounding reverb, but used in moderation it's pretty useful.

One of the most beautiful sounding, unique pedals I've ever seen, jam-packed with useful and interesting features (check out the trails-mode) that kind of makes me hope all the controls were available more easily, but I really can't say I'm disappointed. I haven't tried Timeline from Strymon, but with how happy I am with El Capistan, I'm in no rush.