Ibanez Echo Shifter Review/repair

While on tour in 2018, I thought my delay pedal (DOD Rubberneck) was broken so I went to a local music store to see if there was an inexpensive replacement. They had one of these Ibanez Echo Shifters available, and it wasn't too pricey so I picked it up. It lacks a lot of the features of the Rubberneck, but I considered them nice to have and not necessary (tone on repeats, modulation speed, the pitch shift/rubberneck function). I really like the temporary feedback feature on the Rubberneck, and while there's not a stomp switch dedicated to it on the Echo Shifter, it does have a toggle switch to activate additional gain in the delay feedback to create self-oscillation.

I swapped the Echo Shifter in to my pedal board, and we had a little rehearsal the day before our first show. Everything went nicely, the sound of the Echo Shifter was right in line for what I want in an analog delay. However, at the show that night, the slider for echo time snapped off, like three songs into the set. I am not a wild man onstage, and I would expect a little more from the slider given that the rest of the construction on this pedal is nice and solid. I finished out the tour with the pedal - I pretty much left the delay time setting in the same place anyway - and came to appreciate its sound.

Some other review notes: For my taste the modulation depth control has too much range. I really don't know who uses delays with pitch sweeps of almost an octave on the repeats, but someone must because you can go there with this pedal. Another thing, it would be lovely to have a tails option when going into bypass - I really like that about the Rubberneck as well. Last, I am a fan of stomp switches that have a positive click when you engage them. This wouldn't be practical on the tap tempo switch, but I would prefer it on the bypass switch. It's a small thing though.

After coming home from tour, I discovered that the Rubberneck was just fine after all, luckily. The issue was actually with how I had set up my power supply. Lesson learned - when going overseas invest in a pedalboard supply that accepts dual voltage input so that you don't have to use a stepup converter. The one I was using introduced a lot of noise into the line voltage and I think that was messing with the digital circuitry of the Rubberneck somehow. Interestingly, other digital or hybrid pedals on my board, like my Strymon Blue Sky and DLS Rotosim, were not similarly affected.

On to repairing the Echo Shifter. There are a number of people who have posted repairs to these, including this nice post with info on the replacement of the slider control. I didn't want to just do that- after all it broke almost immediately and I knew it would happen again. Also, I don't generally need or want to change the delay time on the fly, so the ability to push the slider with my foot wasn't a concern. I decided to try to shoehorn in a standard rotary potentiometer as a fix.

First step- disassemble the pedal and remove the broken component. This is a little time consuming due to how the pedal is designed. It's not as easy as pulling apart an MXR or even a Boss style pedal. Lots of loose parts to keep track of.

Here's the circuit board with the slider removed and three flying leads attached to the now vacant pin locations. The pot is a 16mm Alpha, 10K linear. This one came from Tayda Electronics (I like this place for DIY project parts, a lot easier to browse than Mouser or DigiKey) and it has a plastic cover on the body. The part is a very tight fit and there are only a couple of places along the footprint of the old slider that will work, since the 16mm pot is wider than the slider and all those DIP chips come right up to it. I wound up having to cut off the plastic cover from the pot, and since it looked like it would potentially contact traces or solder pads on the board I put a single layer of electrical tape on the bottom. Alternatively, I could have sourced a square format pot like the factory-installed ones elsewhere on the board which should fit pretty much anywhere along the slider's footprint, but I already had the 16mm pot in hand and it wasn't too difficult.

I drilled the top panel for the pot shaft. As I said above, this hole has to line up with pretty much the only place on the circuit board where there's enough space to squeeze in the pot body. A 9/32 or 5/16 hole should do it. Since you're drilling on top of an existing slot, a drill press is a nice to have. If I didn't have a drill press, I would probably have done this with a rat tail file, or a grinding stone in a Dremel tool. In a handheld drill, the bit would just "walk" along the slot and not make a nice clean hole.

Here it is all put together. I had an old skirted knob in my spare parts stash that looked appropriate on the pedal even though it isn't an exact match (and MXR/Rickenbacker style knobs like these are easy to come by if you really need it to look the same). Someday, I will make a modification that will allow the oscillation to be engaged by either the toggle switch, or an external momentary stomp switch, to make it function more like my Rubberneck.