Pete Thorn – Van Halen – Echoplex

A little while back I was bashing the Reverb.com video on “How to Sound Like The Cure“. In that post, I was talking about knowing the riff/piece as well as understanding the “details” from the artist. The details are what make or break a song when you’re trying to cover them – or learn from them. Yesterday, Pete Thorn (who I’m a big fan of) posted a video for a new series called Pete Thorn’s Tone Secrets. Seriously, give this guy a follow on YouTube, you won’t be disappointed.

The episode is titled “Echo Into Distortion”, but what it really is about is how Eddie uses the Echoplex tape delay in the classic song – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love. First let’s take a listen to the original:

In this episode, Pete spends some time to dissect what is happening into the riff. First off, Pete is an absolute animal on guitar, and his ability to play just about anything is truly amazing, and frankly, inspiring.

So the key matching the rhythmic nature of that riff is the Echoplex with light mix, 300ms delay or and low feedback – oh and obvious skill and insanely awesome tone. An original Echoplex are hard to come by and usually very expensive but there are a few great pedals that can pull it off. He used the MXR EP103 Echoplex which does sound amazing, but others that might work nicely are – Belle Echo by Catalinbread and the El Capistan by Strymon Engineering. Like what Pete mentioned, you want something with the analog delay sound, meaning something with dirty and deteriorating delay trails with possible warble/modulation of the delay trails.

I really appreciated that Pete thought about the details to take this to the next level. Let me know what you think by commenting below!