Knobula create modules around interesting ideas that are not always immediately apparent. The Echo Cinematic is a great example of this — you think you’re playing around with a delay running through a reverb when actually that’s not the half of it.
Knobula founder Jason Mayo drew on his experience working in studios in the 1980s. They would often route analogue tape delays through channel strips, where they were EQ’ed and fed back to themselves via the effects send. The engineer would then filter and overdub the delayed sound to the edge of destruction, giving us that signature ‘dub’ vibe. Those elements form the basis of what we have to play with in the Echo Cinematic.
So, you get a nice, grungy tape‑style delay (up to two seconds), sync’able to a clock. The reverb is deep and lovely and good to have, but it is not the main character here. It’s the EQ that takes centre stage, with a nice big knob and an unexpected impact. It feels different because you’re filtering the echoes rather than the input signal, which gives it a sense that the signal is disappearing and degrading after each repeat. But then you’ve also got the feedback system, which has a habit of smearing your audio into surprising textures as it builds into something more sinister. And that build can be slow so that your attention gets pulled back to the Echo Cinematic to grab something to bring it under control, just every now and then.
Manipulation is critical, which is again a bit unusual because I often leave delays to do their thing. So in here, you have two LFOs, one for the delay time and one for the EQ frequency, and the ability to record up to 30 seconds of movement from any and every knob and the CV inputs. You can assign the CV inputs to any control simply by plugging in a cable and then twisting the thing you want to send it to — it seems all too easy.
The EQ section has three filter response curves; a low‑ or high‑pass shelf, a peak with notch or band‑pass, and a comb with four notches or four bands. A resonance knob piles on the emphasis. You can switch it into the traditional dub path of the feedback loop, or just into the delay output, or over the whole lot including the dry input.
The Echo Cinematic can make a weedy melody line sound huge...
The edginess of the filtered feedback loop is such that I don’t feel like it’s safe to leave it alone. Maybe that’s why the knob record function is so useful, because you can push it to the brink, reel it back in and then let it keep doing that on its own. But for me, I like to interact and react to it, give the EQ some movement through the LFO and then dance around the feedback knob. The Echo Cinematic can make a weedy melody line sound huge, reanimate percussion lines and weaponise chords in fabulously groovy ways.
£379
$399