This Week’s Patch: Magneto and Rheyne Music
Welcome to the inaugural post of This Week’s Patch for Magneto, a brand new blog series we’ve created just for you, Magneto fans. The first
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Sound on Sound with Magnetic Personality
One of the most engaging, fun, and potentially hypnotizing features that Volante has to offer is the way it allows you to effortlessly create dynamic loops that degrade and evolve.
Depending on how you set Volante’s sound sculpting controls, pretty soon after you start looping, what may have begun as a few simple notes on a guitar or keyboard will naturally morph into an ambient soundscape, perhaps bearing little obvious relationship to the original input signal!
It’s kind of like starting off on a walk down your own street and a few steps later finding yourself floating through the Horsehead Nebula.
In Volante’s Sound on Sound mode, you can change the loop direction at the touch of a footswitch, press and hold PAUSE for a mechanical tape stop effect, or change the speed of your loop while simultaneously changing the pitch in octave increments.
You can find an inspiring sound while in Echo mode, and all your echoes will remain intact when you engage Sound on Sound.
The loop degrades and evolves naturally (as sound-on-sound tape loops do). When you feel that your loop has reached the perfect state of mutation, you can engage Infinite mode, creating an infinite loop while disengaging the loop record head.
Then you can play over the loop without any further overdubbing (without your new input adding to the loop).
Check out the video below to hear Volante’s Sound on Sound mode in action, and see how it works!
Playing with this pedal makes me want to listen to Evening Star by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno! What kind of music does it make you think of? What kind of music does it make you feel like creating?
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Matt Piper
Matt Piper writes words and makes videos for Strymon. He plays a variety of instruments, including guitar, but sucks at drums and a much larger variety of other instruments. He also makes electronic noises and teaches Fundamentals of Synthesis at the Los Angeles College of Music in Pasadena, California.
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12 Responses
Strymon is truly one of the most sought after guitar pedals, especially in my genre. Any pedal that makes you want to play guitar is a great pedal.
Thank you Kelsey 🙂
This is a beautiful sounding pedal, so much to offer with sound on sound loop heaven. Have a 2012 PRS P22 playing the Volante stereo out to a PRS Archeon 50w and a Rock doctor 18w tube running mostly clean, with a Carl Martin Wah2 and Riverside in between all powered by zuma. Unreal fun.
Is there a way to control Volante looper functions with an external pedal? If so, what functionality can be controlled?
You can control some functions of the looper using MIDI or our MultiSwitch Plus.
The available functions that can be controlled via the MS+ are listed on page 16 of the manual:
https://www.strymon.net/manuals/Volante_UserManual_REVC.pdf
And the MIDI specification is listed on pages 18-19. Hope this helps!
Hi,
you mention here (and in your manual and videos as well):
“The loop degrades and evolves naturally (as sound-on-sound tape loops do). When you feel that your loop has reached the perfect state of mutation, you can engage Infinite mode to stop further loop degradation, creating an infinite loop while disengaging the loop record head.”
So this says that engaging “Infinite mode” will stop further loop degradation.
But that is simply not true. The loop losses on quality after every repeat of the loop. It sounds is getting simply getting duller and duller.
And fixed planed on this? or if not a correction of your statements?
Hey Gernot,
We’re working to get any misinformation regarding this feature fixed in our manuals and other materials. We appreciate your patience, and please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any more comments or feedback.
Quick question on the MultiSwitch Plus…
When configured to be in SOS Looper Mode, can you just tap switch A momentarily to go into infinite mode, or do you need to hold it down for 1 second as you do when the Volante is in looper mode?
Also, the link to the manual in an earlier comment is out of date, latest is here I think: https://www.strymon.net/manuals/Multiswitch_Plus_UserManual_RevE.pdf
Hey Rob, when using MS+ for SOS Looper Mode, you just need to press the A switch to go into Infinite Mode. No need to press and hold 🙂
Many thanks! I think I’ll be needing a MS+ then 😉 Sometimes in the “heat of battle” in SOS mode, I don’t press the switch long enough or my foot slips and I end up reversing the loop. Sometimes that’s cool, sometimes it’s not cool 🙂 Loving the Volante as an all in one delay, loop and reverb pedal for a small-ish board, and of course, it sounds FANTASTIC.
One more quick question, if I may…
I don’t know if it’s do-able in firmware but I’d love to be able to configure the reverb post-loop, so delay -> looper -> reverb. I’m guessing delay post-loop (as you can with the Timeline) isn’t possible?
Just to be clear, I realise that with the current firmware (1.18), that’s not possible. I was thinking if it could be considered (if possible) for an update.
Hey Rob! I can’t promise that’s a firmware change we’d implement, but I’m happy to share that as feedback with the team. Feel free to email [email protected] with any more questions or feature requests!