Roland RE-100

The Roland RE-100 is a tape delay unit released in 1973 by Roland, and it belongs to the first generation of the company's Space Echo machines. It arrived alongside its sibling, the Roland RE-200, which combined tape delay with spring reverb; the RE-100 was the delay-only model of the pair¹².

What it does

The RE-100 produces delay by recording the guitar's signal onto a loop of tape and playing it back a moment later, the approach that defined Roland's early Space Echo line. BOSS's own history article describes the launch plainly: "In 1973, the RE-100 (tape delay) and RE-200 (tape delay and spring reverb) Space Echo units hit the market"¹. On BOSS's Space Echo promotional page, the company notes that "the first Space Echo units, the RE-100 delay and RE-200 reverb/delay, were released the following year"².

A short production run

The RE-100 did not last long on the market. On a JHS Pedals video about the Space Echo line, Josh Scott said, "the re 100 they only made this for eight or nine months"⁴. MusicRadar's history of the Space Echo, written by Ed Mitchell for Total Guitar, records what came next: "The first models, the RE-100 and RE-200, were succeeded the following year by the RE-101 and the model that tone junkies"³ would come to prize, the RE-201. That makes the RE-100 a transitional machine: the opening entry in a line that ran through the Roland RE-101, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and later models such as the Roland RE-301 Chorus Echo and the Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo.

For players tracing the Space Echo family tree, the RE-100 is where it starts: a tape delay without the spring reverb its sibling the RE-200 carried, superseded within about a year by the models that made the name famous¹²³.

Videos

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