I’ve been caught by surprise today by the will to rip the Elektronika RC-02, so here it is, for the first time on the internet wooh!! :)
Before we dig in, i just noticed that it’s been 4 years since Flo Audio started! Already 4 years, time really flies!!
The Elektronika RC-02 is a Russian digital delay made in the early 90s (mine is from May 91), which has an lfo who modulates the delay time, allowing you all the kinds of time based modulation fx such as chorus, flanger, phaser… typical from digital delay lines from 1980 to 1990, but gone since then!
If you are familiar with my affinity towards exotic gear, you know how i feel about this puppy: i love it!!
Honestly it was such a pleasure for me to be able to listen to what people from Russia could listen to in these times, i thought about the guy who could have bought it brand new, who took it home and tried it and thought to himself ‘ i can make any sound in the world with this!!!’.
That’s why it was very important for me to make sure i’d give this piece of gear the respect that it deserves, and capture how beautiful it sounds.
The way the RC-02 works is that you’ve got a matrix with push buttons to set the delay time (check in the pictures i attached in the folder, you’ll understand more easily)
I’ve decided to pick 5 feedback knob positions, and keep everything that sounded useful enough to me, depending on the length of the delays, and on the length of the captures.. That’s why you won’t find an even number of captures in all the folders.
The 5 Positions are:
No feedback: mostly reverbs at this point, 6 irs
9 am: 5 irs
Noon: 14 irs
3 pm: 23 irs
5 pm: 6 irs
54 impulses, everything’s in mono this time, stereoize it your way!
And that’s it! :)
For the next future of Flo Audio, i’m hesitating between several things that i’d like to do, my interest has been re-ignited lately by a friend of mine who asked me a question about spring reverb tanks impedance, and i’ve been thinking about it. So you can expect some of that coming :) I don’t have enough spring reverbs, the ones in amps are cool, but they’re not manageable in a way i like, so making one will be the solution, so i can even swap tanks according to their impedance and have a nice variety of spring sounds, i’ll look into that during the coming weeks!
In January i’ve gotten quite obsessed with comparing a few different kind of transistors of the same reference but built in different decades (70s/80s/now), i made a very simple fuzz face base circuit for it, and it made me realize how the music that we hear is directly influenced by the components that are used in the gear we buy! The ones in the 70s and 80s sounded more ‘hard rock hazy’ while the more modern ones sound instantly metal.. Combining them and biasing them differently, you think about how guys at Ibanez made their 6 new overdrive pedals while having fun one afternoon haha!
(And i’m not talking about reinstalling os9 with all the old school cracked plugins for protools and ableton 4.14, autotune 1 GUI is pure bliss to the eyes, such as Ableton’s compatibility thru time, i could reopen my session from 4.14 in Ableton 10 without any compatibility issues, even the reverb is the same, and it’s my favorite reverb itb, in eco mode only, hi quality mode sounds like 90s reverbs which i don’t like, it’s a victim of its time as well :))
Many thanks to those of you who got in touch, bought stuff, made donations, or even complained unrightfully about things that a two seconds google search would have provided, i’m always happy to interact with you guys, we’re a good bunch of nerds :)
You guys take care, spring is here, have fun making music!!!
My philosophy in life, and in sound has always been that i wanna be free. Knowing how to do things myself, at least understanding intellectually the principle of something that i can then turn into a know how, and make my own.
