Strymon Volante Magnetic Echo Machine: Four Heads, Three Machines, And The Ghost Of The Binson

Most delay pedals ask you one question: how long? The Strymon Volante Magnetic Echo Machine asks you about eleven, and the remarkable thing is that none of them feel like homework. Which magnetic medium — spinning steel drum, magnetic tape, or studio-grade reel-to-reel stock? Which of the four playback heads are singing, and which of them are feeding back into the record head? Where is each head sitting in the stereo field? How worn is the machine, and how badly does its transport need servicing? How much of that little spring tank do you want smeared over the top?

Answer those and you are not choosing a delay time. You are building a machine.

The Volante arrived at winter NAMM in January 2019 and immediately occupied a strange position in Strymon’s own catalogue. It was not the flagship — the TimeLine already held that ground with a dozen algorithms and a preset library. It was not the compact character box either; the El Capistan had owned the small-format tape echo since 2010. The Volante was something else: a deep, single-minded recreation of the multi-head echo machine as a musical instrument, with the drum echo — the Binson Echorec lineage that nobody else was properly servicing — placed right at the front of the pitch.

Seven years later it is still in the line at $429 and still, quietly, one of the most-photographed pedals on professional boards. This is a gear guide, not a review. What follows is what the Volante actually does, which players are genuinely documented using one, how to set it up.

The Artist Column Was Wrong. Again.

The independently documented user list for this pedal includes a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a Nine Inch Nails member, an Opeth guitarist, a Fontaines D.C. guitarist, a Grammy-winning Americana songwriter, and one of the most famous blues-pop guitarists alive. There is photographic or video evidence for every one of them. The Famous Players section below tiers each name by how strong that evidence actually is, and says plainly which are Instagram-post sightings rather than confirmed touring rigs — because a photo of a pedal in someone’s studio is not the same claim as a pedal on a stage every night, and pretending otherwise is how gear writing loses its credibility.

Origins: Westlake Village, And The Machine Nobody Was Copying

Strymon began life in 2004 as Damage Control Engineering in Westlake Village, California, building tube-driven pedals, and took the Strymon name in 2009. The founding engineering group — Pete Celi, Gregg Stock and Dave Fruehling — came to stompboxes from DSP research and studio hardware rather than from the traditional pedal world. That background explains a great deal about the Volante, which is less a pedal design than a physical modelling project that happens to have footswitches.

By 2019 the tape echo pedal market was saturated. What was not saturated was the drum echo. The Binson Echorec, built in Milan from the mid-1950s, did not use tape at all: it recorded onto a rotating magnetic steel drum, with a fixed record head and four playback heads spaced around the disc. Because a steel drum does not stretch, shed oxide, splice, or wear out the way tape does, the Echorec produced repeats that were simultaneously warmer and more stable than any tape machine — thick in the low mids, saturating hard when driven, but rhythmically dead-steady. The units were also stuffed with valves: input buffer, mixer, record and playback amplifiers, tone stage and output mixer all ran through tubes, and that tube count is where most of the Echorec’s famous harmonic density comes from.

Everyone knows what an Echorec sounds like even if they have never seen one. It is the pulse under Pink Floyd’s early work; the multi-head selector is why David Gilmour‘s echoes have that particular galloping subdivision rather than a straight repeat. It is on Jimmy Page records. It is all over the instrumental British rock of the early sixties. And in 2019 there were perhaps two credible ways to get one: pay several thousand dollars for a sixty-year-old Italian valve unit and then find someone who could service it, or go without.

The Volante’s answer was to model all three magnetic media families — drum, tape and studio reel-to-reel — in one enclosure, and then hand the player controls for the mechanical variables that the original machines’ owners could only influence with a screwdriver and a service manual.

Three Machines Under One Lid

The Type switch is the single most consequential control on the pedal. It selects the magnetic medium, and each option is a genuinely different behaviour rather than an EQ curve.

Drum — Steel Wire Spinning Platter

The Echorec model, and the reason most people buy this pedal rather than an El Capistan. Repeats emphasise the low-mid frequencies, sit thick and slightly compressed, and saturate readily when the input is hot or the feedback is high. Because the modelled medium is steel rather than tape, the repeats hold their pitch with a stability tape simply cannot manage — the wobble you hear is deliberate mechanical modelling, not an inherent instability. Turn the Repeats knob up on Drum and the pedal does not dissolve into mush; it thickens into a drone that still has a discernible pulse in it. That is the Echorec trick.

Tape — Vintage Echo Machine Stock

The middle setting, and the one that overlaps most with the rest of the tape-delay world. Warm response, a moderately clean and airy signal path, and the full complement of tape-specific artefacts: saturation, crinkles, splices, contaminants and head wear all live here. If you already own a Boss RE-2 or an El Capistan, this is the mode where the Volante’s advantage is narrowest — and where the four-head control surface still puts it somewhere neither of those pedals can reach.

Studio — Reel-To-Reel

The professional reel-to-reel machines of the fifties and sixties were built to reproduce full-bandwidth audio accurately; the echo effects engineers coaxed out of them were a creative misuse of high-fidelity gear. Studio is the cleanest of the three types, sustains the highest number of repeats with the least degradation, and is the mode to reach for when the delay needs to be big and ambient without eating the top end of the dry signal. It is also the correct choice for anything post-rock or shoegaze where you want the repeats to build into a wash rather than decay into darkness.

The Four Heads: Where The Volante Stops Being A Delay Pedal

The centre of the control surface is a two-row grid of eight buttons. The top row — labelled playback — turns each of the four heads on or off. The bottom row — labelled feedback — decides whether that head’s output is routed back to the record head. These are independent, and that independence is the whole design.

A head with playback on and feedback off contributes one repeat and then stops. A head with feedback on and playback off contributes nothing you can hear directly, but seeds the regeneration loop — which is how you build rhythmic patterns that have a pulse underneath them you never explicitly play. Turn on heads 1 and 4 for playback and only head 4 for feedback, and you get an early tap plus a repeating late tap. Turn on all four for both and the pedal becomes an atmosphere generator.

Two further layers hide in the same buttons. Press and hold a playback button for a second and that head toggles between full volume (green LED) and half volume (amber), which lets you build accent patterns rather than four equal hits. Hold a feedback button while turning the Time knob and you set that head’s stereo pan position — twelve o’clock returns it to centre. Four independently panned, independently levelled, independently regenerating heads is a modular-synth level of routing control on a delay pedal, and it is why the Volante appears in ambient and electronic rigs at least as often as in guitar ones.

Head Spacing

The Spacing knob sets the relationship between the four head positions, and morphs continuously between the marked settings rather than stepping. This is what lets the Volante recreate the irregular head spacing of specific vintage machines — the classic multi-head units were not evenly divided, and their uneven divisions are a large part of their rhythmic signature. Time controls the delay at head 4; heads 1 through 3 subdivide proportionally according to Spacing. Sweep the knob while a pattern is running and the whole rhythmic figure re-proportions itself in real time, which is one of the most immediately musical things any delay pedal does.

Mechanics, Wear, And Playing The Machine’s Condition

Two knobs control the modelled health of the machine, and they are the ones that separate the Volante from a generic tape mode on a multi-effects unit.

Mechanics governs speed fluctuation and media irregularity — friction, creases, splices, contaminants. At minimum you have a unit fresh out of the factory. Past two o’clock the transport is failing in a way that a real technician would refuse to leave alone, and the pitch instability starts doing chorus-like things to sustained chords. Past three it is closer to an effect than to a delay.

Wear controls the wear state of the media and playback heads, which on real machines shows up as progressive loss of high frequencies. Set to minimum for a fresh, full-bandwidth sound. Clockwise, each successive repeat loses more top end than the last — which is the single most important reason vintage echo sits behind a guitar part instead of fighting it, and the thing cheap digital delays most conspicuously fail to do.

Rec Level deserves its own mention. It controls the analogue gain of the signal hitting the record head, which means it is a genuine saturation control rather than a volume trim. Push it and the repeats compress and grit up in the way an overdriven valve echo does. Back it off and the Volante behaves like a clean, well-adjusted machine. Low Cut then shapes the bass content of the repeats, which is the practical fix for the Drum setting’s low-mid thickness in a busy band mix.

Specifications

Famous Players — Tiered By Evidence

Everything below is sourced to a photograph, a video timestamp or a first-party post. Where the evidence is a single social media image rather than a documented touring rig, it is labelled as such.

Tier 1 — Video-Documented In A Working Rig

Jason Isbell is the strongest entry on the list. In the “This Is How I Bliss” video, his effects rack is visible in the opening seconds and the Volante sits in company that tells you exactly how it is being used: a Chase Bliss Condor, Gravitas, Tonal Recall RKM and Dark World, a Hologram Microcosm, an Eventide H9 and an Analog Man King of Tone. That is a rack built by somebody who cares about texture more than about convenience, and the Volante is there as the character echo rather than as a utility delay.

Fredrik Åkesson of Opeth is documented with a Volante on his board at the 20:13 mark of a rig video, alongside a TC Electronic Flashback 2 and an Xotic EP Booster. That pairing is instructive — the Flashback covers clean tempo-locked repeats, the Volante covers everything with a personality. Opeth’s dynamic range, from acoustic passages to full death-metal weight, is the kind of material that rewards a delay you can make sound broken on command. His bandmate Mikael Åkerfeldt approaches the same problem from a different direction.

Frank Iero of My Chemical Romance is visible with the pedal at 44:45 of a rig video. Iero’s board has always leaned toward the abrasive end of the effect spectrum, and the Volante’s Drum type with Mechanics wound up is a very natural fit for that.

Rick Beato is documented using the Volante in a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown. Beato is not a touring guitarist in the conventional sense, but he is one of the most technically literate gear commentators working, and a pedal earning a permanent slot in his setup is a meaningful data point about the pedal rather than about a brand relationship.

Tier 2 — Photographically Documented

Carlos O’Connell of Fontaines D.C. has a Volante clearly visible on his pedalboard in a photo posted to the band’s official Instagram. Given that Fontaines D.C.’s guitar sound is built on layered, atmospheric, distinctly Irish post-punk textures, the Volante in that context is doing exactly the job it was designed for. It is worth noting the lineage: The Edge established the template for what rhythmic multi-tap echo does for an Irish rock band forty years earlier, using very different hardware.

Johnny Bond of Catfish and the Bottlemen is documented with the Volante as the farthest-left pedal on his board, and the detail that makes this entry genuinely useful is what it replaced: a Roland Space Echo RE-20, which had been on that board since Bond joined the band in 2014. A player swapping out a decade-old Space Echo for a Volante is a stronger endorsement than a hundred new-pedal photographs, because it is a decision made against a known reference. Anyone weighing the Volante against a Boss RE-202 should sit with that for a moment.

Wes Borland — of Limp Bizkit, and latterly Marilyn Manson’s touring band — has been photographed using the Volante on his official Instagram. Borland’s whole approach is built on treating the guitar as a texture source rather than a riff machine, and a four-head panning echo is squarely in that territory. Our Wes Borland gear guide covers the wider rig.

Tom Morello posted an Instagram photo including the Volante with the caption “Spring tryouts. #NewHotJamsPercolating.” That is a studio-floor sighting during writing sessions, not a confirmed live rig — Morello’s stage setup is famously conservative and built around a very small number of pedals he has used for decades. Take it as evidence he owns one and was experimenting with it, and no further. The Tom Morello gear guide covers what he actually tours with.

John Mayer showed the Volante in an Instagram story captioned with nothing but a pair of thumbs-up emoji. Again: ownership and approval, documented; touring use, not documented. Mayer’s boards change constantly and are extensively catalogued elsewhere, and the Volante has not been a fixture on them.

Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails appears in an Instagram video building textures with the Volante among his effects. Cortini’s solo work under his own name and as Sonoio is almost entirely about long-form modulated repeats, and the Volante’s Sound on Sound mode with record-head lift is closer to a Buchla technique than a guitar-pedal one. Tycho — Scott Hansen — was photographed with the pedal in a Facebook post dated 6 December 2020, in the same broad ambient-electronic context.

Paul Davids, the Dutch guitarist and educator, has posted about using the Volante. A large-audience demonstration guitarist is a different kind of endorsement than a touring artist, but it is an honest one.

Album Credits

The Volante is credited on Inhaler’s It Won’t Always Be Like This — the single, released 2019, that established the Dublin band before the album of the same name. That is another Irish guitar band reaching for a multi-head echo to build atmosphere, which is starting to look less like coincidence and more like a genre convention.

The Names That Are Not Here

Two clarifications, because both come up constantly. First: David Gilmour did not and does not use a Volante — he used the actual Binson Echorecs that the Drum type models, and his current rig uses entirely different hardware. Citing Gilmour as a Volante user, as some retail copy does, confuses the ancestor with the descendant. Second: Hank Marvin’s Shadows sound, frequently invoked in Volante demos, came from Meazzi and Vox tape units of the late fifties and early sixties. The Volante can approximate both of those sounds convincingly. Neither man has ever endorsed it.

Tone Recipes

All settings assume a mono input into a clean amp unless noted. Head numbering runs 1 (shortest) to 4 (longest, set by the Time knob).

Where It Goes In The Chain

The Volante belongs late — after drives, after modulation, before or alongside reverb depending on how much space you want. Because the Spring reverb is applied after the echo internally, the pedal already handles the classic ordering on its own, and many players find they can run the Volante as their last box.

Two practical points. First, the fully analogue dry path means the Volante does not degrade your dry signal at all — there is no A/D conversion on it, only discrete class-A JFET preamps, so it behaves well even when left permanently in the chain. Second, the Inst/Line input switch makes it genuinely usable in an amp effects loop or fed from a synth or mixer insert, which is why it turns up in so many non-guitar rigs. If you are running it into a modelled front end like the Strymon Iridium, keep it after and use the stereo outputs.

The 300 mA current draw is not negotiable and is more than many pedalboard supplies allocate per output. Plan for it.

Comparisons

Volante vs El Capistan V2

The most common cross-shop, and the answer is genuinely clear. The El Capistan is a tape echo — three machine architectures, six knobs, a small footprint, roughly half the price. The Volante is a multi-head magnetic echo — three media types including drum, four individually controllable and pannable heads, stereo, MIDI, and a looper. If you want tape character in the smallest sensible box, buy the El Capistan. If the four-head grid is the thing you find yourself thinking about, nothing else Strymon makes will scratch it.

Volante vs TimeLine

The TimeLine is the utility flagship: twelve algorithms, 200 presets, a full looper, and the ability to be every delay a working guitarist needs across a two-hour set. The Volante is one delay done exhaustively. TimeLine wins on breadth and preset management; the Volante wins on immediacy and on the specific sounds that only a real multi-head architecture produces. Players who own both tend to describe the TimeLine as the tool and the Volante as the instrument.

Volante vs Boss RE-202 Space Echo

The RE-202 models one specific machine — the RE-201 — with great fidelity, including its preamp colouration and its own spring tank, at a lower price. The Volante models a family of machines and lets you build hybrids that never existed. If you want the RE-201 sound specifically, Boss made the RE-201 and has the tooling; buy theirs. If you want the Echorec side of the story, or you want to pan four heads across a stereo field, the Volante has no real competition at any price.

Volante vs Analogue Delay

An MXR Carbon Copy, a Deluxe Memory Man, a Boss DM-2W or a Maxon AD999 are bucket-brigade devices, and their darkness comes from a physical limitation of the circuit rather than from a model of a mechanical system. They are warm, simple, cheap and reliable, and none of them can produce four independent taps, change medium type, or self-oscillate in a controlled way. Different tools entirely, and many boards carry one of each.

Volante vs Flint And BigSky

The Volante’s Spring algorithm is a genuine, useful spring tank, not a token addition — but it is one spring reverb with one knob. If reverb is a primary voice rather than a garnish, the Strymon Flint or the BigSky exist for a reason. What the Volante’s spring genuinely does replace is the small tank in a vintage echo chassis, which is exactly the design intent.

Sound On Sound: The Looper That Isn’t A Looper

Holding down the two footswitches together enters Sound on Sound mode, and it changes what the pedal is. Each loop layer can carry its own delay settings, so a layered loop is not four copies of the same effect — it is four differently-processed passes stacked on top of one another. The ON switch becomes reverse. Hold it and the record head disengages, playing the most recent loop back with minimal further degradation, which is how you freeze a texture without it decaying into noise. The Favorite switch becomes pause, and holding it ramps the loop down and back up like a tape machine spinning down.

This is not a performance looper for building verse-chorus arrangements — a dedicated loop station does that better and with more forgiving controls. It is a texture generator, and it is the feature that has put the Volante in front of as many synthesists as guitarists.

Buying Guide

New: $429 direct from Strymon as of September 2026, in stock, with the same pricing through the major retail chain. There has been no V2 revision and no announced discontinuation — the Volante has been in continuous production since 2019, and Strymon’s firmware support for the platform has been steady.

Used: roughly $300–$360 depending on condition and whether the box and papers are present. That is a narrow discount for a used pedal, which tells you something about how few people sell them. Because there is only one hardware revision, there is no version anxiety on the used market — a 2019 unit and a 2026 unit are the same pedal.

What to check on a used unit: that all eight head buttons respond and that the LEDs cycle through green and amber correctly when held; that the Time and Spacing pots sweep without crackle, since those are the two most-used knobs on the pedal; that the MIDI ports work if you intend to use them; and that the unit boots cleanly to its last state. Strymon’s build quality is consistently high and genuine faults are rare.

Who should not buy one: anyone who wants a delay they set once and forget. The Volante rewards being played and punishes being ignored, and a player who mostly wants a tempo-locked quarter-note repeat behind a solo will get there faster and cheaper with a Boss DD-3 or a Line 6 DL4. Also anyone whose board is out of space or out of current — the enclosure is large and the 300 mA draw is real.

Ownership Notes

The bypass mode is switchable between true bypass and analogue buffered bypass, which is worth setting deliberately rather than leaving on the default. In a long chain the buffered setting is usually the better choice; the buffer is a good one.

The dry path being fully analogue means there is no latency penalty and no conversion noise on your core tone, which makes the Volante one of the few DSP-heavy pedals that is genuinely unobjectionable to leave switched on all night.

The single Favorite footswitch recalls one preset instantly, and the remaining preset slots are only reachable via MIDI, USB, an external switch or a MultiSwitch Plus. This is the most common complaint about the pedal in owner reports, and it is a fair one: if you need three or four distinct echo sounds across a set, budget for the MultiSwitch Plus or a MIDI controller at the same time as the pedal, not later.

Expression pedal control is available over a wide range of parameters and is genuinely worth wiring up — sweeping Repeats or Time with a foot while playing turns the pedal into a performance instrument rather than a set-and-forget box.

Power is not included in the box. Nine volts DC, centre negative, 300 mA minimum. Strymon’s own Zuma and Ojai supplies are specified with this draw in mind; many older boards’ supplies are not.

Frequently Asked Questions