Oh man, so good. Love that.
And, yeah, H9 would be sweet. I see the Max version on eBay from time to time for $550 ish, which is a steal if you consider that's the whole enchilada. A Space is nearly that price, and with the H9 you get everything Space, Timeline, and a clutch of other Eventide effects in a compact studio quality box. Want, want, want... Maybe some day.
I just have a BugBrand Spring Tanker for reverb. It sounds great, but the exposed spring tank does pick up some interference so you have to be mindful where you place it. Anywhere near speakers and the feedback just runs away. I love the way it sounds, but it isn't practical in real use. I was thinking of grabbing a used EHX Cathedral, as I've seen them in beautiful shape for about $150. It's no H9, but does some great reverbs for the money and seems to be the go-to for a lot of musicians on a budget.
The Strymon and Eventide boxes sound better and are more flexible, but it's hard to stomach the cost of admission.
Well, yeah, the H9 Max is a good buy considering the cost of the single machines/algorithms its based on but I can't justify spending that much on a fx device. It sounds wonderful, though, I've played around with one at a music store, they had a Nord Lead connected to it and the juicy, musical, out-of-this-world reverbs just blew me away.
I have an Alesis Nanoverb 2 and a DigiTech Studio Quad that provides up to four mono fx lines simultaneously but I use only two simultaneous effects as I want stereo output. Easy to use, lots of different effects, very good delays. Reverbs are okay. For long reverbs I use the Nanoverb 2, its spring reverb and tape echo are excellent.
Stuff like the Nanoverb or Studio Quad can be found cheap on ebay these days, as it is the case with most early/late 90s studio gear. It's amazing what you can get for only a few bucks. For someone like me who still makes music with hardware only but has to cope with a tight budget, being able to buy stuff that once was called high-end for less is like a gift from heaven. I love "recycling" abandoned tech.
Speaking of reverb effects, here's an interesting new product by OTO, the BAM Space Generator:
http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2016/04/20/oto-machines-bam-space-generator/ . Sounds very nice from what I can tell. OTO are a good company, their Biscuit fx machine still is on my wanted list.
That said, I've watched the
Sonic State review of the new Korg Volca FM... well... sounds great and has a lot of very cool features and whatnot but so far it seems to be impossible to use external DX7 editors on it. Korg say that it's 100% sysex-compatible to the original and this seems to be correct as it is possible to transfer DX7 patches to it via sysex dump but for some reason you can't directly edit the parameters with an editor. My original plan was to retire my trusty old DX7 and replace it with a Volca FM with its clean output (the original DX7 is very noisy) and live-tweaking options... hope this problem gets sorted soon. I'd hate it if this thing would become a mere patch player for all those tens of thousands of DX7 sounds that are floating around... don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good stuff available for free but I prefer making my own patches, it's an important part of my creative process, using presets just isn't my thing.
