REVIEWED: Waves Factory Echo Cat

Echo Cat is the new Waves Factory emulation of the 1958 “Copycat” by Charlie Watkins, a tape delay with 3 playback heads mainly used during the 60s and 70s.

If you’d like to know more about the original hardware click here

As digital technology develops so does the audio plugins and this one is proof of that not only doing an incredible job at emulating the hardware but also bringing more features to the table which would not be possible in the “real world”.

Let’s start with the heads: Previously on the original hardware the heads were pre-set, now you can modify each one of them to your taste adjusting Volume, Pan, Time (You can also sync with your DAW), a LPF and a HPF activating and deactivating each one of the heads from the white 1, 2, 3 buttons underneath.

Moving on to the “TAPE” we got 3 sections:

Now let’s modify the MOTOR behaviour with 2 more sections:

When getting to the MASTER there are some interesting features:

Apart from all of the main features, Echo Cat comes with an HQ button to allow oversampling, a Panic Button in case you need to erase the tape suddenly, 77 presets, the option of saving your own presets, a By-Pass button as Power ON 220-240 AC and if you’re having issues with the rendering of the plug-in you can try to enable/disable OpenGL on the top right burger menu. AH! I almost forgot. The screen is resizable!

Final thoughts:

Waves Factory Echo Cat really gave me the feeling of using an old analog hardware. For a producer in-the-box like me, it is an amazing way to get closer to that raw signal. I’m definitely using on my productions from now on.

You can grab the Echo Cat from Plugin Boutique here