Strymon Magneto

I’m there with you… been avoiding checking it out too much.

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we are in the same club then

Pre-ordered. Will report back as soon as I have had time to play. Really looks like it should maybe have its own mini skiff to play as an instrument, which is just as well as I have no room left in my main cases…

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Can’t preorder from France…too bad.

guys, do you know when magneto is going to be available? are there any shop in EU for preorder?

Available next month in the US and about 40 days later in the rest of the world is what they said in the videos I think.

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Sounds truly amazing, though I can’t imagine replacing my DLD with this. The dual channel UI really inspires some very simple and creative patching.

After the initial enthusiasm, are there any users out there who’ve used the magneto for a while and would like to share their experience?

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I’ve had Magneto since it was first released, and love it. My focus is melodic ambient music, and the Magneto is slanted towards musical applications. You can use it for experimental work, but the controls and workflow are generally designed to produce musical results. As others have noted, the lack of cv control over individual head playback level is unfortunate. The build quality is first rate, and the Magneto packs in a lot of useful functions. The tape effects, and “spring” verb are high quality algos. If you’re not into effects/lo-fi processing, the Magneto is probably not the right choice.

Aside from the effects, the sound quality is immaculate. The different options of multi-tap delay, looper, and sampler are easy to use and useful. The signal flow and associated controls are beyond most eurorack modules–everything can be dialed in precisely–gain staging is a snap.

Strymon has a bunch of Magneto videos that cover the majority of functions–worth watching the full series. Magneto is a fairly big and expensive module, so I’d make sure you’re on board with at least most of the functions before jumping in. If you’re looking for something wilder and more experimental, the Bastl Thyme looks like an awesome alternative.

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Still on the fence about it myself, so your words are welcome. Takes on “hot” gear seem to evaporate as soon as they’re released. It makes sense, but it becomes harder to get a sense of their real-world usefulness.

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Yes, much appreciated. Strymon videos are informative but hearing from users is different and always good. There’s quite a few posts on MW but I thought I’d ask the good people of lines. Curious to hear more from others.

i’m putting my magneto on the bench and auditioning double chronoblob in it’s place for now. at first i was blown away by the sound of the module, then i got sick of it and every time i patched it up i got the “magneto sound”. completely personal preference, i just don’t really enjoy using it as a eurorack module. but i’m also currently trying to take my setup back to simpler times where synths felt weird and exploratory and not so commercially appealing.

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You can’t really go wrong with Chronoblobs… :slight_smile:

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as much as i love my El Capistan, it’s been in a box since January and like wow a whole cool world of music i wanted to make emerged out of the fog, the super great sounding fog

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Thanks fellow linespeople, for sharing your experiences. I think magneto for me was/is this kind of module where the minute I saw it announced my brain pinged a “oh but this one you should buy”, and then when it finally arrives at the local dealer many months later things have shifted somewhat but the initial zing is also still there, almost with some small irrational sense of obligation – “but we said we’d get this one”. And it’s a lot of hp and a lot of money (but… maybe this is the module that will open everything up?) I love reverbs and delays but perhaps magneto is too much of them packed into one same thing? For sure when I started out and had fewer modules the moments of incomprehensible magic occured more often. But now I also know more, which sometimes gets in the way. (Although, I also don’t know a lot.) Balance, I suppose, as always. (Or not balance.)

Has anyone considered building Magneto into it’s own little case to combat it’s gigantism?

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Someone on MW did…

I’ve been looking at the Magneto with starry eyes since before I got into modular. I love the Strymon sound and the multi-playhead functionality for layering sound, but would a Chronoblob + DLD combo make more sense for a smaller system? I am a delay junky and I don’t want to use pedals.

I had a chronoblob prior to owning a magneto. I sometimes miss the chronoblob footprint but the space that magneto takes in my case is definitely worth it. It just ultimately sounds so much better and is a rather deep module for a delay. A chronoblob + dld takes up more space than a magneto though

I had a Magneto and the sound is quite nice (if not too nice, even with the more lo-fi settings). Though I found most of its features to be too gimmicky on the long run pretty soon. It quickly gets into the always-the-same-rainmakerish-sounds territory and I rather would have used it to create tape sound and simple delays as an end of chain effect and found that it was too big for this. Also the CV control features did not meet my taste - I never would have used the individual clock outs but would have always missed individual CV inputs for the tape heads. Plus I did not like the change in signal flow they introduced wit the first bug fix update and was a bit annoyed by this (small) conceptional change after purchasing a module. So I did not keep it and am still happy with the El Cap and the analogue tape plugins Waves occasionally offer for their varying constant sale prices. Within the modular I use the ER-301 and the Tapographic Delay combined with spring reverb and EQ filtering of the feedback for nice oldschool delay sounds.

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