Watkins Copicat - Tape Echo IR Pack
(Vintage tape echo tone)
At a glance
8 impulse responses captured from a vintage Watkins Copicat tape echo
4 individual tape heads
2 input gain settings per head
Great for lo-fi texture, vintage delay shaping, and creative sound design
Works in any IR loader or convolution plugin
A little backstory…
I’ve always loved the sound of vintage tape echoes. They’re unpredictable, noisy, and full of personality - all the things that make them inspiring to use. One of my favourites in the studio is my Watkins Copicat, a classic British tape echo that’s been part of countless recordings over the years. I often use my mine with zero feedback just to get the sound of the unit.
What makes these units so interesting isn’t just the delay itself - it’s the tone of the tape, the heads and the circuit. Each head has its own slightly different character and frequency response, which is a big part of the sound people associate with these machines.
These old units won’t be around forever, so while mine is still running happily I captured the individual tape heads as impulse responses, allowing you to drop that character directly onto anything in your session.
I now reach for these often when producing and mixing - whether I’m looking for a cool moment on a vocal or on a guitar break, for shaping a delay send, or just giving a track a slightly more worn, vintage edge.
What’s Inside
4 Tape Heads
Each of the Copicat’s playback heads has its own tonal fingerprint - subtle differences in frequency balance and texture that give each one a slightly different feel.
2 Gain Settings
Each head was captured at two input gain settings on the unit: Low Gain - a cleaner, slightly worn tape tone High Gain - a more coloured response from the circuitry. That gives you 8 IRs in total, each offering a slightly different flavour of the Copicat’s character.
How I use these
One of my favourite things about this pack is how versatile it is.
- Directly on tracks - instant lo-fi vibe on vocals, drums, guitars… pretty much anything
- Before a delay plugin - place it on a delay send to give modern delay plugins a convincing vintage echo tone
- Creative sound design - combine it with other lo-fi processing (telephone EQ, distortion, filtering) to get something more unique and less “stock effect” sounding
- Guitars - it can actually produce some surprisingly interesting results as a cab IR.
Because these are impulse responses, you can load them in your favourite IR loader or convolution plugin and use them anywhere in your mix.
Vintage tape echoes are wonderful machines… but they’re also noisy, fragile, and not exactly convenient to wire into every session.
This pack lets you pull up a bit of that character instantly.
Enjoy.
- Faz
