Hologram Electronics Chroma Console Multi-Effector

The Microcosm Granular Delay Looper from Hologram Electronics has been one of the most talked-about and used pedals over the course of the last 5 years, and for good reason. The crew at Hologram have a way of coming up with combinations of effects you never knew you needed, and that’s the case once again with today’s piece of gear. The Chroma Console packs a TON of effects into one pretty pedalboard-friendly enclosure, along with more routing, signal chaining and other various options that will vault this pedal onto any pedalboard out there…

Chroma Console is a flexible multi-effect pedal that takes inspiration from the eccentricity, grit, and lively instability of beloved vintage recording technology, combines it with brand new sounds, and delivers it all through an intuitive user interface that puts wide-ranging sonic experimentation at your fingertips. You can easily re-order the effects and experiment with different signal chains – process reverb through a fuzz, run a reverse delay into a pitch shifter, or run the evocative, gritty sound of an aging cassette recorder into a stereo double-tracker. You can use one module to overdrive another, and the entire signal chain can even be pushed into gentle soft clipping when approaching the headroom limit.

Chroma Console is Hologram Electronics’ attempt to distill some happy, vintage sonic accidents (cranked 4-track cassette recorder preamp, clipping kick drum, crunchy lo-fi converters on an old sampler, snarling filters on a vintage synth, etc.) into something you can use and enjoy every day. It’s not a studious emulation or tribute to any specific piece of gear, although Hologram has spent years carefully researching (and exploiting) the most exciting “limitations” of beloved gear from many different eras. It’s a tribute to the sometimes messy, sometimes chaotic, but always exciting things that can happen when you allow yourself to experiment.

• 20 Vibrant Effects
• 4 Rearrangeable Effect Modules
• Stereo or Mono Input/Output
• Sophisticated Input Level Calibration
• Knob Recording with GESTURE feature
• Sustain and loop audio with CAPTURE feature
• BYPASS Foot Switch Customization
• Configurable Filter Effect (TILT, Lowpass, or Highpass)
• 80 User Presets
• MIDI In/Out/Thru, clock synchronization
• True Bypass Switching/Buffered Bypassed with trails
• Tap Tempo, which can sync time-based effects and modulation effects

This is one of those pedals that’s a tad difficult to categorize, which usually turn out to be my favorites. The Hologram Electronics Chroma Console gives you access to a multitude of effects, but in unique and surprising ways, leading to a broad scope of sonic experimentation and exploration. In our demo video below, we get to create some huge auditory textures, check out how all these effects play off of one another, delve into the presets and more. This is one powerful tool to use in basically any type of musical situation – if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up…cheers!