Happy Friday (from New Zealand)
Based on the obscure Dynacord EC 280 Electronic Echo (1977), Dynacord’s first non-tape echo.
It is a dark, dense, and deliberately gritty 1970s bucket-brigade echo and reverb sound.
Sound Characteristics
- Dark and Dense: Eight BBD chips at a slow clock roll off everything above about 3 kHz, so the repeats sit deep and warm behind the dry signal rather than ringing out crisp and defined. It glues whatever you feed it, and works great on synths and drums as well as guitar.
- Lofi and Gritty: The bucket-brigade line aliases and blurs, and each repeat passes back through the filters, so the trails get darker and dirtier as they decay. Push the Duration and the loop quickly tips into self-oscillating, dubby chaos.
- Unnatural Reverb: The reverb mode isn’t a spring or plate. It is built from a spread of delay taps, giving a deep, smeared, distinctly artificial space that online reviewers call magnificent.
- Randomly Modulated: The chorus is driven by filtered noise rather than a regular LFO, so the pitch drifts and warps unpredictably. With fast Speed and high Duration it edges into flanger territory.
Cult Status
- A rare studio oddity that was prized by experimental guitarists, synthesizer players and producers for its strange, atmospheric textures (rumoured to be used by Boards of Canada). It paved the way for Dynacord’s better-known VRS 23.
Odd quirks and controls
- Mostly true to the original it can get pretty noisy, do not expect anything remotely clean!
- Tail switch allows the chaos to continue while cutting the input only (not on original)
- Toggle between ECHO and REVERB with 4 “presets” each.
- The presets are “hackable” just like the original. Long press any preset to add it to the active selection! (the original had radio buttons that could be pressed simultaneously to make them stick)
- It’s a mono unit, one “mix” out, and one 100% wet output.
- The “Volume” controls the amount of dry signal into the mix output, just like the original. Set it to 5 for unity gain.
- The “Return” controls the amount of effect into the mix output.
- For added fun I added a “deluxe” setting that doubles the original 300ms to 600ms.
Installation
Cloudbuilder install for Duo, DuoX, and Dwarf
Make File:
ec280.mk (334.7 KB)