Adjust the balance between reverb and delay. 

Start out with immersive reverb and only a touch of rhythmic delay taps. Turning the knob to the other extreme produces clear, articulated delays with faint reverb. The center position creates a dense mixture of equal parts reverb and delay.

Pressing the button introduces reverb pre-delay to create a sense of spatial distance between you and the reflections. The pre-delay time remains rhythmically linked to the delay time knob.

The delay time ranges from 1 millisecond to 10 seconds. From metallic ring-mod textures to forgetting you had a delay.

Engage the button to instantly reverse the delay. Back to normal. Reverse it again. Back and forth. With your finger on the button. Or your foot on the switch.

We nominate 2 millisecond reverse delay as your new favourite weird distortion.

The knob response is carefully tuned, so you don’t get lost in the 9.999 seconds of delay time range.

This knob controls both reverb decay and delay repeats.

Start low for short early reflections and a single delay repeat. Turn it up to reach lush echo tails. Around 4 o’clock, you’ll discover the sweet spot where both reverb and delay sustain infinitely without collapsing into noise. But keep turning the knob and throw all precautions to the wind. Let the self-oscillating feedback take over. A loud noise warning is warranted.

The button activates granular reverb processing that ranges from audio-rate textures to slow, pitch-shifted modulation. The reverb tail is sliced into rhythmical grains that jump between octave and perfect fifth intervals. The grain size (or rate) remains rhythmically linked to the delay time knob.

This is the control that gives monk its voice. It determines how much reverb and delay pass through the monk formant filters. All the way up and you’ll hear only the strange monk resonances. Dial it back to blend them with clean and lush echoes.

Press the button to shift to voice character mode — from deep, moody male tones to ethereal female timbres or bright child-like resonances. A single twist changes the emotional color of your entire soundscape.

Two ways how the monk echo can accompany you.

With the button off, you are in control. Explore different vowels and find the one that feels good.

By pressing the button you let monk echo take over. Focus on your playing dynamics and once monk echo detects a volume accent it will choose a different vowel. By turning the knob you can determine how quickly one vowel will glide into another. From quick robotic jumps to smooth human-like transitions.

Add movement. From slight chorusing to sickening instability. Both modes control the reverb and delay modulation but in two different ways.

With the button off you get a classic static sinewave modulation and the knob lets you dial in the modulation depth to your taste. Nothing wrong with good old classic modulation. 

But when you turn the button on, the movement in both reverb and delay follows your playing dynamics. Play a note and the sound fluctuates for a moment and then returns to stability as your note decays. Play a louder note and it fluctuates even more. Crank the knob, stab a heavy chord and both the reverb and delay will wobble and bend under the pressure.

By now you should have created big and lush monk echos. Now it is time to make them ugly.

With the button off, you are distorting the once beautiful reverb and delay tails. At first, it is a very slight distortion, reminiscent of an old radio with a weak speaker. But keep turning the knob and you’ll eventually get to a massive wall of overblown sound. Yes, it dooms.

Press the button and explore a more subtle side of ugly. If distortion adds to the sound, then degradation removes it. It removes a few bits of sound here and there. Like a vinyl crackle that sometimes pleasantly disrupts the music. Increasing the degradation will make the monk echo loose even more bits of itself, inevitably ending up with only a few short fragments of what it used to be – like a disintegrating mind.

The main footswitch activates monk echo. It uses a high-quality buffered bypass, preserving your tone and allowing reverb and delay tails to continue even when the pedal is bypassed.

Pressing the switch longer and applying pressure allows you to perform the macro control with your foot. This makes all parameter knob and button automation accessible on stage while your hands stay busy playing your instrument.

The secondary footswitch toggles between preset and tap tempo modes with a long press.

In preset mode, you can scroll through and recall the 8 onboard presets, or save new sounds to any slot using the footswitch together with the 8 buttons, which also serve as preset indicators. In total, 100 presets are accessible via midi.

In tap tempo mode, the footswitch temporarily overrides the delay time knob for rhythmic tapping. After setting the tempo, the delay time knob can still be adjusted gradually — it always remains unquantized. Tap tempo subdivisions can be accessed by pressing the macro control knob and are saved with each preset, giving you both quantized and unquantized delay options at all times.

The dot display provides clear visual feedback for all parameters and how the macro control interacts with them. Setting up and performing with the macro control becomes intuitive thanks to the gently dancing lights that mirror every change.

It also indicates bypass status, tap tempo, incoming midi messages, and guides you through the settings menu.

The display brightness is fully adjustable, ensuring comfortable visibility in any environment — from bright stage lights to a dark home studio late at night.

The macro control lets you adjust several or all parameters at once – smoothly and with precision. Think of it like a DJ turntable – with a single gesture you can alter the whole sound.

You can use it as a simple utility (for example, increasing feedback while lowering volume to compensate) or as an expressive sound exploration tool.

Setting up macro control is easy:

• Press and hold the button for the knob you want to link.
• Turn the macro control clockwise to increase the parameter and anti-clockwise to decrease it. Turn as far as you want the parameter to move.
• Release the button – the setup is done. Repeat for other desired parameters.

Now turning the macro control knob will move all linked parameters at the same time each following the direction and range you’ve defined.

Press the knob to access secondary sound shaping parameters – low frequencies, high frequencies, and delay stereo width. And hidden behind a long press is a comprehensive yet simple system menu including, bypass modes, MIDI setup and other utilities for integrating monk echo in your setup.

monk echo is designed and manufactured in Latvia.

It is housed in a heavy-duty steel enclosure, finished in two-tone powder coating with a light sand texture. The front panel features a high-durability screen print and custom mentha works potentiometer knobs.