Obviously, There is nothing better then the real vintage gear. As vintage gear is very difficult to get anymore there are allot of developments ongoing utilizing DSP units mainly available as H/W input devices to the guitar soundchain. All devices claiming to be a valid replacement for the wonderful vintage effects but most are a very poor representation of this vintage era.

The utilization of VST modules allows the effects designer to utilize more features and specific vintage effects and a better finetuning over the mentioned hardware based DSP units available. Building a product that will be better than what's on the market today is an interesting challenge as it is a discovery tour of what can be achieved with the present VST development environments on standard windows PC's.

The VST modules we present are a result of a couple of years experience in analyzing, developing and creating patches for various echo gear. From an engineering point of view, the objective was to emphasis on the available vintage measurement libraries and applying the do- act-improve cycle to the design at hand as to maximum the possible performance possible.

The final approach taken is a dual approach. In many cases the guitar player is not interested in fine- tuning an echo device but would just like to select a recommended setting and play along with it. For this type of player the standard forthcoming eTAP standard VST module is depicted.

In other cases the guitar player requires matching the exact echo with the echo that was used to record the track from his/her favorite artist. The eTAP Engineer VST module is the assigned module that fits this requirement as it allows customizing the filter characteristics in minute details.

For all modules delivered, the emphasis is geared towards the vintage echo's used by H.B. Marvin during the 1960-1965 era. We believe "from the man himself" that the early recording are made without the Meazzi gear but with some sound- engineering tricks.

The mentioned vintage echo gear allowed the Shadows to sound like the recording while performing life. Our approach would allow also for a fine tuning towards the "studio delivered" echo's.

The VST module presented here allows for those two mentioned approaches as it will act as a normal vintage device emulator or can be fine-tuned to your specific needs.