Eventide H9 vs. Strymon Volante: a comparison ten years too late.
I bought the H9 in 2014 and the Volante in 2018. Here is what I actually use them for in 2026.
I bought the Eventide H9 in 2014. I bought it because Andy Othling kept posting videos of textural shimmer pads on Instagram and I was twenty-eight and impressionable. I bought the Strymon Volante in 2018, four years after Strymon shipped it, because by then everyone had stopped talking about it and the resale price had come down. Both pedals are still on my board. They do different things now than they did when I bought them.
The H9 is the more capable pedal on paper. It has every Eventide algorithm — the H910/H949 pitch shifters, the Crystals shimmer-pitch reverb, the ModEchoVerb, the Blackhole, the Pitchfuzz that nobody talks about and that is one of the most original sounds ever shipped in a stompbox. The pedal itself is two presets per algorithm, MIDI-controllable, expression-controllable, and ugly. The interface is genuinely hostile. You will not edit a patch on the pedal. You will edit it on the H9 Control app, which has not been meaningfully updated in years and which crashes on iPad about once an hour.
The Volante is the opposite. It is a tape echo and pseudo-spring reverb that does one and a half things well and almost nothing else. You can program a head pattern, you can set the wear and the wow and flutter, you can pan the heads in stereo. That is the whole pedal. The interface is excellent. The knobs feel good. The pedal looks like a piece of pro audio equipment, not a toy.
Here is what I actually use them for in 2026. The H9 sits at the end of my chain and does one thing: Crystals shimmer reverb on a single preset I made in 2016 and have never touched. That is it. I have not used another algorithm in two years. The Volante is on all the time, set to a three-head pattern with the wear all the way up and the spring reverb at about 30%. It is doing what an Echoplex used to do on every record from 1968 to 1975 — adding a low-level slap and a tape-like ambient halo that you don't hear until you turn it off.
What does this mean for you? If you are buying one of these two pedals in 2026, the question is what you want it to do. If you want a Swiss Army knife of weird sounds and you are willing to put up with the app, buy the H9 Max used for $400 to $500. If you want one specific sound — tape echo plus low-key ambient — buy the Volante new for $530 or used for $400. Do not buy both. The overlap is small and the cost of board space is high. Aris (aris.kemp) plays an acoustic D-28 in DADGAD into a Volante and nothing else, and the result is one of the most evocative live setups I have ever heard. He does not own an H9. He does not need one.
'The H9 sits at the end of my chain and does one thing. I have not used another algorithm in two years.'
— Johnny
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