HISTORY:
Danelectro oozes USA musical history although this pedal has very little connection with the original Danelectro other than in name because since Danelectro’s formation in the late 1940s, the company has undergone quite a number of organisational, ownership and product line changes and when this pedal was released in the late 90’s, the name Danelectro was owned by Evets Corporation. This is one of their effect pedal offerings and it does a pretty good job and thankfully it has a much better build than the little FAB series plastic pedals!
The whole purpose in life of this pedal is to give the musician access to those old analog tape sounds and effects … and more! I don’t recall any tape based effects units that could provide 1.5 seconds delay …
While not limited to, musicians who work in the ambient, post rock, rockabilly or shoegaze genre’s could find this pedal’s capabilities to be extremely interesting.
Basically it is a simulator of the old reel tape delays and while not quite like the “real thing” it does a pretty good job. You can create warm, atmospheric, analog tape delay “sounds” packed into a nice tough solid METAL case (although pretty large for a pedal of this type) and it is easy to manage. Suitable for both live stage work or in the studio, we always had this one in the studios – it has never seen a live gig in it’s life!
I am a techie by trade (or was until I retired) so I am also going to describe what I found inside and my thoughts that came to mind …. let’s describe this box of tricks
DANELECTRO – Reel Echo
Magnetic Tape Delay Simulator
Released to the market in the late 1990’s, I think we purchased this one around 2004

Effects provided:
Authentic (but simulated, there is no mag tape inside!) analog tape delay experience
Delay is variable up to 1.5 seconds
Multi-track layering is possible using the SOS (Sound On Sound) stomp switch (left side)
Tape warble control (to simulate “natural” pitch variance)
Taken by themselves, these effects are nothing too startling but when the musician begins to mix and play around a bit, some very interesting effects can be achieved.
Powered by either a small 9V battery OR an external 9V plug pack (NOT supplied)
Housed is a strong (steel not Aluminium) stylish two part case (top section and lower section) which is coloured primarily a surf Green colour topside and Brown underside.
Being steel, this is quite heavy at 1.4Kg but at least it doesn’t move all over the floor when the stomps are used
Probably more important is the size, this is no midget pedal, the dimensions are:
236mm wide x 164mm front to back x 51mm height (including the rubber feet)
INSIDE THE BOX
My technical background drives me to investigate the inside of any electronic equipment, to see how it was engineered and the general construction standards.
This unit is firstly very easy to “open up”, just remove the four feet screws on the underside plus 2 further screws on the rear. The two steel case sections now nicely separate to reveal the main board plus another board which is really just for the stomp switches and RED leds.
Technology used is SMD and the active devices are:
4x TL072C (Dual JFET Op amp)
HCF4053 (Analog multiplexer/demultiplexer)
3x HC373 (Octal digital latches)
HC137 (Decoder/Demultiplexer)
2x IS61C256L-12TL1 (256K SRAM)
06DDLDT (unable to identify the function – custom?)
88AK03M (unable to identify the function – custom?)
ATTINY2313-20SU (8 bit uController, this is the brains of the unit)
PCM3500E (unable to identify the function – custom?)
What does all that mean? This has some analog Op amps (TL072C’s) but the rest are basically digital beasties. While most are not difficult to obtain (if replacement was ever required) I could not identify 3 of them and the uController has 2K bytes of flash so you cannot replace that without having the software required for flashing.
All this seems to be a moot point because I have not seen or heard of anyone having issues with the main