Ibanez Eco Shifter Oscillation Mod

 It's been a while since I posted anything here... COVID times were pretty fallow at the studio. Things are looking a little more lively again though, and I did make an additional modification to my Ibanez Echo Shifter pedal that I thought might be useful to someone.

I have already posted about this pedal and how I fixed the broken speed slider. I've recently been swapping things around on my pedal boards - I keep one for bass and another for guitar - and the echo shifter has been earning its keep lately on the guitar board. It certainly isn't the most full featured analog delay out there, and it's kind of big, but I really like how it sounds and it has stayed in rotation while other delays haven't. I've also noticed recently that Ibanez has come out with a new version of this pedal the ES-3 - which has this mod I am about to describe built in! Along with speed control for the modulation which is nice.

The mod I am going to describe is my attempt to make the oscillation circuit more useful during guitar performance. Stock, this is engaged with a small toggle switch and adds gain to the regeneration circuit, leading to runaway repeats and cool warped sounds that are what makes analog delay so sought after. I like to use this selectively, and not for entire songs or even parts. The toggle switch is kind of hard to manipulate with your foot. I wanted to be able to control it with a stomp switch. My first thought was to use a switching TRS jack and a momentary stomp switch in a remote enclosure, which would take a lot of work and parts. I am glad I sat on that idea for a while, because now having owned and used this pedal for several years I realize I never use the tap tempo feature, and in fact would prefer not to have that function on a footswitch at all, too easy to accidentally hit it in a live setting.

I realized that I could re-purpose the tap tempo switch to serve as a momentary stomp-friendly switch for the oscillation circuit. This involved cutting the traces to the switch, and adding some flying wires back to the original toggle switch. Due to how the toggle behaves, this has one limitation: the LED for the osc circuit will not light up when using the stomp switch to activate it, but will still light up if you use the toggle to turn on the osc.

Step 1: open up the pedal, and find the smaller circuit board (connected with the three wires) that holds the two foot switches. Cut the traces that lead to the tap tempo switch. I used a dremel tool with a cutoff wheel, but you could use a file, a knife, a handsaw, whatever.

Step 2: get two short pieces of wire, and solder them from the outermost two contacts of the oscillation toggle switch to the two solder pads of the tap tempo footswitch. There was some heat shrink insulation on my toggle switch that I had to remove first. It does not matter which of the two toggle contacts goes to which side of the tap switch - it's just a normally open SPST switch so whichever way will work.

That's all there is to it. When you're done you should have new wires that look something like this (the twisted blue ones):

Having used the pedal with this new modification, I really like it. It's so easy to add a little swell of delay feedback at the end of a lead part or whatever, I may risk over using the gimmick.

Someday I would like to try out the ES-3 to see if it sounds as good as the ES-2. I am a little skeptical about the multi-function tap/oscillation switch... other pedals that I have used with these sorts of controls have been difficult for me. But, if it's reliable, could be a great way to go especially since they have added speed control for the modulation.