Hologram Electronics Microcosm: A cheat code for making ambient music
Sometimes I come across an effect pedal that almost feels like cheating because it just makes everything sound amazing. Empress Effects’ Reverb and Earthquaker Devices’ Afterneath come to mind. And now, Hologram Electronics’ Microcosm joins that list. You can run almost anything through the Microcosm, crank the mix and reverb up to 100 percent, and get washed away by gorgeous drones and pads. Honestly, if that’s all you did with it, nobody could blame you.
But the Microcosm is more than just a drone machine. It’s a deep, flexible effects pedal capable of adding subtle texture or completely transforming your instrument. And that’s a good thing because, at $449, it needs to be more than a one-trick pony — no matter how good it is at that trick.
Pros
- Can make almost anything sound gorgeous
- Excels at ambient pads and drones
- Wide variety of effects from glitchy to spacey
- The looper alone is almost worth the price
Cons
Summary
The Microcosm is basically a one-stop ambiance shop. It can turn almost any incoming sound into a gorgeous soundscape. But it can also be a rhythmic glitch machine, a top-notch loop pedal, or even a fairly straightforward delay. It’s more than just a one-trick pony, which is important because the $449 price is a bit steep.
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. The pedal has 11 different effects, divided into four categories. And each effect has four variants, bringing the total number of presets to 44 (not including the 16 user slots). In essence, this is a hyper-specific type of multi-effects pedal.
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. There’s an excellent reverb unit, a modulation section, a resonant lowpass filter, and a 60-second phrase looper onboard. There’s also a freeze function, MIDI support, and an assignable expression pedal port. Some of these have limited controls, which is understandable considering the interface limits. But overall, you have an impressive number of tone-shaping tools at your disposal.
Honestly, there’s so much to cover when talking about the Microcosm that it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s begin with the actual hardware itself. The first thing you’ll notice: It’s huge. It’s not the biggest pedal, but it’s definitely large by modern standards.
Around 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. My one complaint here is that the stereo input is a single TRS jack as opposed to separate right and left ones. 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. On the plus side, Hologram Electronics includes a power adapter in the box, which almost no pedal manufacturers do anymore. (This turned out to be a real godsend since my cheapo pedalboard power supply introduced a lot of noise.)
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. The lone encoder on the right navigates through the various presets. Each effect lights up as it’s selected and the four lights above the middle footswitch (which turns the pedal on and off) indicate which particular preset of that effect you have selected. Those lights also show value levels, the direction of audio playback, and are how you navigate the global menu.
The eight knobs to the left all have relatively clear primary and shift functions. (The secondary controls in light gray are accessed by holding down the shift button.) I say relatively because, while it’s fairly obvious what “mix” does, the “Activity” and “Repeats” controls are a little vague. The manual breaks it down pretty well, though:
“In general, Activity gives you ‘more’ or ‘less’ of what each preset does, and Repeats controls how long the effect goes on for.”
In short, they’re macro controls that aren’t mapped to one specific parameter and instead control a host of things depending on which effect you’ve chosen. They’re also highly interactive — meaning changes you make to Activity can impact the way the Repeats control behaves. A simple example of this would be in the Pattern effect which is a rhythmic multitap delay. Turning up the Activity increases the number of “taps” or delay lines. While Repeats controls the number of times each tap sounds. As you layer more delay lines on top of each other, and the more they repeat, they create new and increasingly complex rhythms until you reach complete chaos.
This level of interaction and depth also means the Microcosm feels just at home on a desktop as it does a pedalboard. While you can connect an expression pedal and perform some filter sweeps, the way it reacts when you start turning multiple knobs at once makes it feel like an instrument as much as an effect. In fact, it’s quite easy to record a simple loop through the Microcosm and build a full, rich and evolving arrangement simply by changing the parameters. It’s quite easy to get lost turning knobs as a loop plays, slowly pushing it towards a wash of ambiance.
The looper
Terrence O’Brien / Engadget
The looper is also an essential ingredient in what makes the Microcosm special. It’s feature-packed and flexible. Ignoring everything else, the Microcosm is a great looper pedal. Once you activate it by pressing the phrase looper button the basic functions are straightforward: The left footswitch starts and stops recording, and adds overdubs. A long press undoes or redoes an overdub. The right footswitch stops playback when you tap it, and erases your loop if you hold it down. This is, more or less, the way any looper works.
From there, things get much more interesting. For one, you can quantize your recording and sync it either via tap tempo or MIDI. This can help avoid awkward gaps or stutters at your loop point, but more importantly, it syncs up with the pedals’ rhythmic effects to keep everything nice and cohesive. There’s also a button for quickly reversing your loop, plus speed control which can operate in a stepped mode (1/4X, 1/2X, 2X and 4X) or run smoothly from 1/4 speed to 4X speed. Most loopers I know of only do half-speed and double-speed, if they have speed controls at all.
Then there’s “Burst” mode, which records when pressing down the left footswitch and immediately starts playing when you let go. Pressing again erases your loop and starts capturing new audio. This mode definitely takes some getting used to, and I haven’t quite figured out the best way to take advantage of it, but it’s there.
One of the most unique features is the ability to place the looper either before or after the effects. This gives you the option of imprinting a loop with one effect and then recording a new line on top with a different one. Or recording a clean loop and changing effects after the fact to create a sense of evolution or to just audition different ones until you find what works best with a particular riff. Just one quirk to be aware of: Since user presets can actually include a pre-recorded loop, scrolling through them will stop playback. So, if you’re using the looper and changing effects in a live setting, just make sure to avoid the user banks.
There’s also a button labeled “looper only,” which disables the primary effects. This is key to the Microcosm’s versatility because it doesn’t disable the reverb, modulation or filter sections. This means you can use the Microcosm as a simple chorus, vibrato or reverb unit, or treat the filter section almost like a wah. That said, the voicing and sensitivity of the filter aren’t really suited to replacing a wah. One thing that would be nice here is the ability to define the range of an expression pedal because honestly, only the very top of the filter sweep is useful on a guitar.
