Heaven on Cloud 9 (H9!)

This week on our Pedals with the Pros feature, Larry Mitchell cut some time out of his busy schedule to chat with us. He had tons to say about the H9, so we figured it would be better if he just said it all himself… blog takeover!

What a wonderful little white box of joy and possibilities.

I got my H9 back when it first came out. From my past experiences with Eventide products, I didn’t really hesitate. I had already owned the Time Factor, Mod Factor and Pitch Factor. When they came out with this little white box of joy that could load all those existing algorithms, I was thrilled. I just needed to make sure it had the same high-quality sound as the other boxes.

Silly me. Of course it did! Maybe even slightly better.

Implementing The H9

It quickly became that it was always around on my various pedalboards. It became the pedal that went from my small pedalboard, where it was used mostly for pitch and big reverbs, to my big pedalboards, where it was used for all the basic utility tools: chorus, flanger, phaser, and sometimes big reverb atmospheres of goodness. For a while, I carried it and and an overdrive pedal with me strictly as a backup for my entire rig. It’s kind of a Swiss Army box; I feel it can used in many situations.

Then I decided that I can still carry it with me as part of my backup rig, but use it with my current main rig as well. My main rig, for a long time, has been a Fractal Audio AX8 amp modeler and multi-effects processor, but there’s lots of overlap as to what the two boxes do.

What did this mean for my setup?

Between the AX8 and those awesome boots, the H9 barely fits!

Well, at first when I would create huge ethereal patches on the AX8 and, as it was approaching a CPU overload, I could use the H9 for reverbs. That eased the CPU load on the AX8 big time. After a while though, with all of that power available to me in both units, I started making even bigger ethereal atmospheric patches using both units, and not just using the H9 for basic guitar reverbs. How could I not?!

The Spacetime algorithm is awesome with layering chorus and reverb and long delays. Using this alongside big verbs and delays in the AX8 creates huge soundscapes, but also simple, beautiful-sounding, mood-altering otherworldly tones. Check it out:

Here are some of the presets I’ve made for Blackhole, Band Delay, and Hall:

Download Larry’s Presets

AX8 + H9 = ꝏ

With the routing possibilities in the AX8 and its ability to MIDI Preset change send message per scene, I can also do some really cool things…The AX8 has 8 scenes per patch. So I can make a patch with a wah, amp, cab sim, multi tap delay and dual delay. I also run the H9 into the effects loop of the AX8. This allows me to bring the H9 in and out of the signal path per scene. And with the MIDI commands, I can do all of this:

Have the H9 be a Chorus in scene 1,
Tremolo in scene 2,
A big huge floating reverb in scene 3,
A spring reverb in scene 4 (usually my soloing scene in all of my patches),
Scene 5 can have it become a dual pitch an octave down and a fifth below,
Scene 6 can be a Pitchflex algorithm,
Scene 7 Spacetime long delay,
And scene 8 can be a more lush chorus.

And that’s just one preset/patch. Think of the possibilities!

The Setup

Right now, I use the main rig: AX8 and H9.

Sometimes an extra H9 and a Rose make it to the party, too.

The backup rig is the same H9 on a tiny Nano pedaltrain along with a Line6 HX Stomp and a Wampler Tumnus overdrive. This serves as a nice backup rig; but also, it’s a rig that I can use along with my main rig with the H9 in the effects loop and the Tumnus and the HX Stomp in the main input of the AX8.

That’s it. But, again, think of the possibilities!