I’ve been agonizing over delay pedals for a while, posted about it in first few days of the [email protected] community. To recap, I wanted a delay pedal with tap tempo and quick access to self-oscillation. I have a “stereo” chorus and tremolo, so once I had decided to find a new delay pedal I also decided it should support stereo.

With the Boss DM-101 and RE-202 as very strong contenders, with a few too many nitpicky limitations at their high price points, I picked up a Strymon El Capistan. It’s my first Strymon pedal. It’s replacing a Danelectro Dan-echo. The Dan-echo is good for the features it has, but it’s a very basic feature set. The Capistan adds stereo, tap tempo, multi-head tape (with controls to adjust distance between tape heads, tape age, and wow/flutter), self-oscillation, sound-on-sound mode, reverb, and support for external control via foot switch, expression pedal, or MIDI.

Not the cheapest option I considered but cheaper enough than the DM-101 and RE-202 with enough of the features I wanted.