Roland RE-301 Chorus Echo

The Roland Chorus Echo RE-301 tape delay was owned by Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

## Stewart Copeland's Roland RE-301

Stewart Copeland is best known for his use of the **Roland RE-301** tape delay to create polyrhythmic effects with his drums in the late 70s and early 80s, particularly on the hi-hat and snare.

He typically operated the Chorus Echo with a footswitch, so he'd turn it on for a verse

Here's how Stewart remembers his discovery of the Roland Chorus Echo (note that he sometimes refers to it as the Space Echo, which is the name of the RE-301's predecessor):

> "One afternoon when we got a pay day, we were touring in America and one day we were in New York with money in our pockets and we went down to Manny's Music store on 48th Street... We just picked instruments off the wall... We got every Roland device they made - Sting and Andy each got a set of bass pedals, amps, and delay lines. The Roland [Chorus] Echo, Andy got one, so I wanted one too and I got [myself] one.
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> "The next day at soundcheck out [at My Father's Place] in Long Island, we brought all our new toys, arrayed on the stage. With my new Roland amp and my new Roland echo device, I'm sitting there playing my drums and I haven't got a guitar but I want to play with my echo, so I put my snare drum through the echo. Within seconds, 'whoa! This is cool!' And so we spent the afternoon in an orgy of repeat echo and totally f\*\*ked up the gig that night with repeat echo and that was the beginning of it. It became more refined.
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This account seems consistent with Stewart's diary entries, which state he bought a Roland Echo at Manny's on 1 October 1979. With the concert at My Father's Place in Long Island was on the 2 October, the day after.

However, Stewart already had a Chorus Echo before that date. The earliest photographic evidence of the Chorus Echo is in a May 25, 1979 concert photo. And he had also employed the Chorus Echo for delay effects on the ***Reggatta De Blanc*** album (released the day of the My Father's Place concert).

There's a possibility Stewart had first acquired one around 29 March 1979 (the date of the band's previous My Father's Place concert) given his recollection. Or more time elapsed between him acquiring the chorus echo (for a guitar) and him trying it out in soundcheck on the drums.

At some stage in the *Zenyatta Mondatta* tour, Stewart Copeland switched to using digital delays such as the Deltalab DL-4. Jeff Seitz (Stewart's drum tech) noted that the Chorus Echo "is fine in sort of a limited range [of frequencies]", that it had a "terrible top [end] and there was no bottom [end] because of the size of the tape, which is small". Whereas a digital delay reproduces frequencies from lowest to highest and has no degradation at all.

### Quotes

> "In fact, the delay was a chance discovery which made cool hi-hat stuff really easy. It was a simple trick which is a one repeat delay, so it doesn't have multiple delays and it doesn't build up, it's just one repeat and that makes it much more crisp and with different settings you can get different rhythms. The basic one, which turned into a guitar technique that you can hear all over not only Police albums but U2 albums as well is the dotted eighth note, or quarter note, delay. What that means is, when you go 'chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk,' the delay of it is a repeat of the one before the last chunk that you played so the result is 'chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga'. Instead of it just being hit-repeat-hit-repeat, it's hit and then repeat that you're hearing is a repeat of the hit before the last hit. Am I making any sense? It's one step removed and the note value is either a dotted quarter note or a dotted eighth note."
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### References

* Beat Intstrumental Tony Horkins interview
* Stewart Copeland diary entry 1 October 1979
* *The Police 1978-1983* book by Lynn Goldsmith
* *Modern Drummer*, October 1982
* Classic Drum Sounds: 'Reggatta De Blanc' (quotes)

## Sting's Roland RE-301

On the *Reggatta De Blanc* and *Zenyatta* tours, Sting was using the Chorus Echo for echo effects on his vocals. He also had one in his demoing setup for *Zenyatta Mondatta*.

### References

* Didi Zill photos
* *Sounds*, 23 February 1980 - referred to as Space Echo, when he meant Chorus Echo
* Ghost In The Machine tour program

## Andy Summers' Roland RE-301

Andy Summers ran effects from his Pete Cornish custom FX board into the Chorus Echo before going back into the board.

Despite having a Chorus Echo, he preferred using the Maestro Echoplex EP-2 for echo effects on his guitar. He later replaced the RE-301 with the SRE-555 model.