The Echoplex EP-3 Cascade: Mick Taylor's 'Time Waits for No One' Solo

Mick Taylor’s solo on “Time Waits for No One” is often considered his finest work with the Stones. The secret weapon was a tape echo unit fed back on itself. The engineer set an Echoplex EP-3 to ~300 milliseconds of delay and cranked the feedback control until the repeats started to regenerate — turning each note into a self-sustaining, decaying shimmer.

That feedback loop didn’t just repeat the phrase; it layered Taylor’s liquid bends into a hypnotic wash. The tape mechanism itself added slight pitch warble and frequency roll-off, so each successive repeat softened and spread. The result feels less like a conventional solo and more like the guitar is melting into thin air. Keith Richards later called it “Mick’s ghost.”