MXR M309 Joshua Ambient Echo

The MXR Joshua Ambient Echo is your ticket to iconic sonic sanctuaries, featuring a foundation of carefully concocted tones and textures, highly customizable delay, and other features to help you craft soundscapes worthy of tonal trips out of the ’60s and ’70s and ethereal ambience from the ’80s.

On the side you have the classic input and output jacks, along with a second jack on the output side – this can be set to allow either external tap tempo, expression pedal, or even stereo output depending on how you set the small recessed switch next to it.

Up top, controls for delay, regeneration and mix are fairly straightforward, while the powerful division control shifts the repeats from simple quarter notes to dotted eighths and triplets. The mod control unsurprisingly introduces modulation to the repeats, and voice blends in octaves to the echo repeats.

And then there’s more in the shape of the illuminated push-buttons up top. One controls a second quarter-note repeat that can be added to your current setting, while the other turns on trails.

MXR has packed in an awful lot of powerful tone-shaping features in a really clear and straightforward way – it can be as simple or as complex as you need. Under the hood there are also some powerful secondary settings with some clever control tweaks – most notably holding down the footswitch for a few seconds turns it into a tap tempo footswitch.