This one took about two years to complete – not my best track record, but I have my reasons. Questions: What is it? Answer: it’s the pre and post channels of an analog tape delay crafted from a 3 head Marantz portable recorder provided by my good buddy Dereck from Chambara Records. The original idea was to simply rewire the deck and have a couple routing options between the record head and the playback head but I ran into a snag or two – for instance, our pregnancy – soldering in the house when the windows can’t be opened and a pregnant lady? Nope. Or Xime being 10 days early, which really bit into the whole scheduled “better get these things done now or else it’ll be really difficult to catch up later” period. Not that I can blame her – she’s awesome. Ooh, or the Guitar Player article – not that a flood of orders is a bad thing. And so on. And then when I finally had a second, my original idea didn’t work and it took forever to figure out an alternative. Not to mention that I had to abandon the idea to try to modify the deck itself. Machinist I am not, and it’s not like I have other vintage high-end tape decks lying around in case I screwed things up. And then this happened and I knew I really needed to get my act in gear. Not wanting to just replicate the Space Case, I made a breakout box with an active, buffered send/return and put a PT2399-based vibrato on the input and the output for extra wobble and warble. And it worked. Awesomely! Looking forward to hearing what becomes of this one.