Echo Cat is our new audio plugin, based on a famous and sought-after piece of recording hardware from the 60s. There's a story behind why I modelled this specific piece of gear. Let me explain it to you.
We have to go back to 2009. I was just finishing my studies in "Audiovisual Communication" when we
were told that the last 3 months we will be going to a real company. The point was to implement in a
real life situation what we had learned during the previous years.
The majority of the my classroom mates went to work to the major TV studio in Mallorca. I was already
sure that I wanted to dedicate my life to audio (and not TV), so I asked to join a recording studio
instead. I was lucky enough to join a big recording studio. There I learned the basics of recording:
types of microphone, polar patterns, the sound of the room, acoustics, tape, AD/DA, preamps, analog
consoles, outboard gear, compression, EQ, what mixing was, what mastering was, how to record a drum
kit, dealing with clients...
“ We model gear that has been part of our lives.”
One day I arrived to the studio and the studio owner said to me: "come, see what I got yesterday on the flea market". I went into his office and there it was, a Watkins Copicat MKIV. "What is this?" I asked. "It's a tape delay, it works in this way: the input is recorded into tape through this recording head, then the tape spins and it gets read by these three playback heads", etc.
Every Sunday he was going to a big flea market in a neighbour village because, if you're lucky he
said, you could find great recording gear at very low prices. This gear is sometimes sold by someone
who doesn't even know what he's selling, that he got from another guy. The same person who's offering
a Waktins Copicat is also selling pictures, furniture, clothes, a tennis rack and an
umbrella.
The studio owner saw the Copicat and asked the salesman: "does it work?", which
he responded "it sounds incredible!". He was laughing while he was telling me this story. "He didn't
even know what it was! Probably he thought that it was some kind of amplifier".
Fast forward a couple years...
I bought a Watkins Copicat through Ebay thinking of making a plugin someday.
The rest is history.
