A couple years back, a pedal came onto the market that was unlike any we had all seen before, the Dream Sequence Filter/Tremolo/Sampler/etc. from Hologram Electronics. After the success of that beauty, the Hologram crew came up with another astonishing effect, which we’re going to check out today. The Infinite Jets is a wildly ambient machine, with a ton of sustain and exquisite sampling abound, making for a creative and exploratory pedal that’s sure to put many smiles on many faces.
Where to begin? Infinite Jets tracks the dynamics of your playing, sampling both individual notes AND chords, then uses two independent channels of infinite sustain to offer Blur, Synth, Glitch and Swell effects. The chords fade from one to the next, creating giant washes of ambient textures, glitching granular loops, filtered synthesizer sounds, violin-like fuzz, distorted delay and vibrato and more. There are 10 preset variations to use, as well as 2 user save slots, for keeping your favorite settings in tact. You can even plug in an external expression pedal, which is mappable to many of the controls.
Speaking of controls, there’s a lot to digest on the Infinite Jets, for sure. The Trigger Mode switch offers three ways to control the samplers: Mono, Poly and Manual. The 4 voice presets offer different options as well: Blur freezes and reshapes your notes, while Synth samples your playing and converts it into two different synth sounds. Your signal gets chopped and reassembled in Glitch mode, and Swell uses special dynamic processing to add dramatic volume effects to your playing. The Envelope Shape knob offers you six waveform options to shape the output volume of each sampler channel, and with Envelope Time you can control the sustain for incoming notes and even loop the current waveform.
The Dimension knob controls a different, distinct set of controls for each preset voice. Blur (Space/Feedback), Synth (Lowpass Filter Cutoff), Glitch A (Sample Playback Length), Glitch B (Sample Selector) and Swell (Space/Feedback) each produce their own unique tones, featuring combinations of delay, filtering, feedback and more. The Drive knob adds some analog but digitally-controlled overdrive into your signal, and Dry blends the effect in with your original instrument signal. The center footswitch toggles the true-bypass relay switching, turning the effect on and off, while Footswitches A & B are used to sustain individual notes, or fade new notes or chords in and out. Footswitch A also serves another function, letting you adjust the LFO controls for the Secondary Functions of the Env Shape, Env Time and Dimension controls (Shape, Frequency and Depth, all marked in red).
Needless to say, there’s a lot going on here. Not sure if you’ll ever quite recreate any of the sounds the Infinite Jets produces, as it is a constantly-evolving, creativity-inspiring and boredom-crushing machine. Using all of these controls results in so many variations of sound that it’s hard to categorize this pedal, which are absolutely our favorite kinds of effects. We’ve attempted to showcase some of what you can do with it in our demo below, but know that this is an experimenter’s dream, and one that truly needs to be right in front of you for you to experience in all its glory. Hats off to the Hologram Electronics wizards that made the Infinite Jets possible – the first two pedals these guys put out have been real gamechangers, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
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