Strymon is on a roll lately. After introducing the brilliant and powerful Magneto to the Eurorack market, they are now taking pre-orders for its pedalboard-friendly followup, Volante Magnetic Echo Machine.
Volante is a stereo multi-head delay that also offers a looper and vintage spring reverb.
Strymon relentlessly studied and faithfully recreated every last magnetic delay system attribute to capture the nuance and complexity of classic tape and drum echo machines.
Creative Echoes
Situated at the center of Volante’s control surface are four delay playback heads with individual playback and feedback controls — each head’s playback level can be set for full volume, half volume, or off, and each head can be switched in or out of the feedback circuit.
Creatively, users can even switch heads into the feedback circuit that are not activated for playback, putting the creation of complex rhythmic patterns, as well as reverb-like atmospheric textures, at anyone’s fingertips.
Volante not only delivers the warm, luscious delay signals that magnetic tape machines are known for, it is also capable of a high degree of saturation — simply turn up the REC LEVEL knob to increase the gain of Volante’s analog class-A JFET input preamp circuit, sending a hot signal with analog warmth to the record head for facilitating any amount of saturation.
Some classic tape echo machines included small integrated spring reverb tanks tuned to limited bandwidth. Strymon skilfully captured this vintage vibe for Volante by creating a spring reverb with a gorgeous, gentle character that stands up to scrutiny on its own while also enhancing delayed signals.
Some vintage multi-head tape echo machines’ heads were not evenly spaced, which created interesting sonic interactions when multiple heads were set to repeat. Volante far from disappoints on that score; spacing is continuously variable for the entire travel of the SPACING knob, morphing between the available even, triplet, golden, and silver settings — the latter two ratios respectively realising dense, non-overlapping echoes and non-overlapping echoes biased toward the quarter note.
Delayed psychedelic feedback sounds can be unleashed on command when working in Echo mode by pressing and holding the ON footswitch to activate Infinite Repeats; regardless of the current REPEATS setting, Volante will crank up echo regenerations for quick-building delay feedback — foot off of the switch results in Volante returning to the previous setting.
Speaking of performance, Volante can create dynamic loops that degrade and evolve. Change direction at the touch of a (reverse) footswitch. Press pause for a mechanical tape stop effect. Change the speed of the loop and simultaneously change the pitch in octave increments.
MIDI And More
Armed with full MIDI control of every parameter, plus 300 preset locations, Volante is designed to be the center of sonic expressiveness for MIDI pedalboards.
Also, a dedicated INST (instrument)/LINE input level switch ensures that Volante can comfortably work with a variety of input sources — switch to INS when using a guitar level input, LINE when using Volante in the effects loop of a guitar amp or driving it with a hot output from a synth or mixer insert.
Price and Availability
Strymon is already accepting pre-orders for Volante via the Strymon Store to American Samoa, Canada, Puerto Rico, United States, and
For more in-depth information, including informative video demonstrations, please visit the dedicated Volante webpage.
