The lone encoder on the right navigates through the various presets. There are a number of buttons, lights and knobs on the front that might seem a bit intimidating at first, but it’s easy to figure things out once you get going. (This turned out to be a real godsend since my cheapo pedalboard power supply introduced a lot of noise.) On the plus side, Hologram Electronics includes a power adapter in the box, which almost no pedal manufacturers do anymore. This is fairly uncommon on synths and other guitar pedals and means you might need a TRS to dual TS cable to hook up your gear. My one complaint here is that the stereo input is a single TRS jack as opposed to separate right and left ones. It’s not the biggest pedal, but it’s definitely large by modern standards.Īround the back, you’ll find the requisite audio ins and outs, along with 5-pin MIDI In and Out/Thru, and an expression pedal jack. The first thing you’ll notice: It’s huge. So let’s begin with the actual hardware itself.
Honestly, there’s so much to cover when talking about the Microcosm that it’s hard to know where to start. But overall, you have an impressive number of tone-shaping tools at your disposal. Some of these have limited controls, which is understandable considering the interface limits. There’s also a freeze function, MIDI support, and an assignable expression pedal port. There’s an excellent reverb unit, a modulation section, a resonant lowpass filter and a 60-second phrase looper onboard. Part of what makes the Microcosm stand out among a growing sea of granular and glitch pedals is the supporting cast of features Hologram Electronics includes.
In essence, this is a hyper-specific type of multi-effects pedal. And each effect has four variants, bringing the total number of presets to 44 (not including the 16 user slots). The pedal has 11 different effects, divided into four categories. It feels a bit bleak with the microcosm right now.The Microcosm is, at its core, a granular processor, meaning that it chops up incoming audio into little bits, processes them and spits them back out. I'm experienced with these things and have run other pedals in the same configuration with zero issues, so I've been through a lot of troubleshooting. And I've come to here to read through other people's experiences, maybe in the slim hope of a solution.!įor info, I'm using it as a send effect from my QU16 mixing desk, so I have very fine control over inputs and outputs.
All I can do now is make some recordings and send to support to check if it's normal. It's crazy for such an expensive pedal that it's so flawed. I emailed support, they gave me standard instruction manual stuff, all of which I'd tried, and said that True Bypass isn't available in Line Level mode. It's almost impossible to get it to do a global or factory reset. The knobs change the volume or effect in a really steppy way, it's like they're super low resolution or something. It's like the processor is clipping, it's awful I get regular pops and clicks in pretty much all of the presets - regardless of input level or settings. So you boost the volume which brings up the noise floor etc. The effect volume is definitely low, no matter how I configure global settings and overall effect volume etc. It's way noisier than my Ventris, or a Zoia etc etc. It definitely adds white noise as you describe. The whole time I've spent with it has been chasing issues. Yep, I've had Microcosm for a week or so, and had chance to play with it a couple of times.