Echo Fix - EF-P3 Chorus Vibrato Review
The ultimate analog chorus & vibrato pedal?
Echo Fix is a pedal company from Australia that has one of the most amazing stories. They started out as a repair company for old Roland Tape Echoes - the famous RE-201 and after a lot of years of experience in doing that, and knowing how the Tape Echo works in and out, they decided to create a brand new Tape Echo themselves. The EF-X2 and the EF-X3! Those big desktop tape echoes are a modern and faithful recreation of the original Tape Echo by Roland with a few added modern features and it’s probably the best delay unit money can buy.
As it was expected, the Echo Fix Tape Echoes cost a lot. More than 2.000€ to be more precise. And while this is totally understandable, they are not that accessible to most home producers and musicians. So, for Echo Fix to have a wider audience, they started making new original designs, in a conventional pedal form factor, starting with the amazing Spring Reverb, the EF-P2 which was also featured in our Best Pedals of 2023 Awards. Right after that, they released the EF-P3 Chorus Vibrato pedal that we have in the studio and we are going to review it today!
The EF-P3 is a fully analog Bucket Brigade Chorus & Vibrato pedal that focuses on sounding great and not on having a ton of features. In fact, it is a very simple and easy-to-grasp pedal. But at the same time, it sounds beautiful on anything you feed into it.
Controls
The pedal comes in a solid metal enclosure and the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s much heavier than it looks. It is a robust and hefty pedal that is certainly made to last. On the back, there is a mono input and output and a 9V socket for power, and on the front, there are just 4 knobs and two footswitches.
The bottom two knobs are Rate and Depth while in the middle, there is a cool graphic that uses lights to display your rate speed. A very nice touch for sure. On the top part, there is the Resonance knob that sets the amount of the signal that is fed back into the Bucket Brigade input and the Waveshape knob that changes the modulation waveform from a pure Sine wave to a Triangle wave.
The right footswitch is the Bypass switch that turns the pedal on and off and the left footswitch is the Direct On/Off that either lets your dry signal pass through or kills it completely. And that’s how you get Chorus or Vibrato. Chorus is essentially a duplicate signal that has a slight pitch and timing variation that plays on top of your dry signal so if you use a Chorus fully wet you get only the signal with the pitch modulation which is a Vibrato. They could instead use a Dry/Wet Mix knob but I, personally, prefer the way they implemented it on the EF-P3. Chorus is a pretty distinct effect so you either want it or not so a Mix knob does not seem that necessary to me. If you want to cycle between Chorus and Vibrato it’s much easier to just press a footswitch and remove the dry signal completely.
All things on the EF-P3 are pretty self-explanatory. As I said before, this is a very clean and simple design. The only thing that’s a bit more mysterious is the Resonance knob. This has a quite big impact on your sound and if I had to explain it’s a way to boost even more the chorusing effect. Fully counterclockwise the Chorus is somewhat more muted and subtle and fully clockwise, it is much more profound and bright that’s almost a flanging effect but not quite there.
Overall Experience
I’ve been playing with some very complex and deep pieces of gear either it’s pedals, Eurorack modules, or synths and my experience with the EF-P3 was quite refreshing. It takes you about a minute to fully understand what it does and then you just play sounds through it and focus more on that for a change. It is very obvious that this was Echo Fix’s goal when designing this pedal. To create a beautiful-sounding analog chorus that will be used as a tool to make music without distracting you from that and making you spend hours tweaking knobs and discovering its features. This is, of course, also cool, but sometimes you just need something that you can just plug in and play. And the EF-P3 is definitely that.
The Rate & Depth knobs have a great range but they won’t get to extreme territories. I can almost say that this creates usable results in any knob position even if you max out everything. The Waveshape only has a Sine wave, which is the most common modulation waveform for choruses, and a Triangle wave so don’t expect Saw & Square waveforms or something like a Random LFO that can create wilder effects. For the Resonance, I found myself leaning more towards using it at low values or fully counter-clockwise because I liked the muted chorus tones it created a bit more.
But how does it sound? Well, as I already hinted, this pedal sounds amazing! It is a lush, round, and warm effect that works perfectly with any sound I play through it. I mostly used it with synths since I’m not the most talented guitar player (ok, I’m horrible) and it instantly gave my synth parts that 80s, retro vibe that only chorus and vibrato can create. If you want some weirder, seasick tones, this is maybe not the perfect pedal for you since it’s very well-tuned to stay usable in all of its range but, yeah, if you max out the depth things get pretty wobbly indeed. It’s a great companion for keys and pad sounds because it adds that extra dimension a lot of basic synth patches crave for. On the guitar, you immediately get the indie rock type of tone we all love either with chorus or vibrato. If you love those Mac Demarco guitar tones, this is it.
Conclusion
The EF-P3 Chorus Vibrato is an awesome, no gimmicks, pedal. It is built like a tank, it’s dead simple to use, and the sounds coming out of are warm and lush. The beauty of it lies in its minimal controls and well-designed circuitry that feels like a vintage analog chorus pedal. The only thing I would add would be to make it stereo. I really think that by giving it width, it would sound even better but I can live without it.
I use a lot of pads and keys to my music so this will stay on my board for these types of sounds. Synths through this pedal immediately sound more vintage since chorus was the definitive sound of 80s synth parts and this pedal will certainly deliver. It’s, for sure, a more premium option when it comes to modulation pedals but it’s probably going to be the only Chorus, Vibrato you’ll have on your board.
I really love the direction Echo Fix is going. They make products that focus on quality, both in terms of build quality and in sound. They also make fully analog devices so I guess the next logical step would be an analog delay? Or, even better, a Tremolo? In any case, I’m hooked and very curious to see them grow and see their pedals in more home studios and setups because they definitely deserve the recognition and hype they’re getting!
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