Hard Time with the Microcosm

I’ll say it differently: clicks in, clicks out :wink:

You probably should run it with Midi Clock do the attack is preserved.

Wow this thread was a GAS crusher. I nearly pulled the trigger on one of these today (at sub £350 for a new unit, seemed to good to be true but that’s a different story)

But it sounds pretty flawed in practice, and less exciting than the countless videos I’ve watched make it appear to be

I wonder if a Zoia could do some of what the Microcosm was capable of?

The Red Panda Particle2 has already been given love in this thread, but I’ll just mention it again.

1 Like

Not that I feel a personal need to sell this pedal on anyone, but I think it largely comes down to what your expectations are. What you get depends on what you give, and it sounds to me like a bit of the lamentation is born of not being able to bridge the two. E.g. my expectation wasn’t a pedal that “makes anything sound beautiful”. That’s a blatant clickbait statement. The glitch algorithms work well for my percussion, the granules work well for my pads. The former algorithm gives me free variation, the latter gives me another layer of randomization

To mention of unpredictability, with Elektron devices specifically, repetitiveness is something I look to minimize in my tracks. I am already utilizing conditional triggers, random LFOs, and live recorded animations. The Microcosm just adds more to that minimization. If that is something you strive not to have, then the Microcosm requires a lot more dialing in to be tamed. Some people don’t have the time/patience/energy for that so I don’t think it’s a good buy for those folks. To me the pedal is like having a second person in the room giving me improvisation in all its raw good/bad.

10 Likes

I’ve got a terrible noise coming from the pedal. Nightmare on stage, sound engineer is not happyand neither am I.
I’m using the provided power adapter.

(I made a small video but i don’t know where to upload it to share it here).

Anyone has the same issue?

youtube

No account there, can’t get bothered going thru all the process for that.

yes

I had noise issues too with the included power adaptor they even sent me a replacement. Switching to a CIOKS solved the noise issues.

Similar noise?

What’s a CIOKS?

Midi clock might have been the cause. I tried a lot of different materials, but even slow attack would make the occasional click.

Not that loud :joy:

I’ve not used the phrase looper yet after owning it for one and a half years. Bloom Music makes a good case for it here, might try that more often. Not such a big fan of the final track he made with it. But having the looper level as some kind of performance knob is really cool.

Are any of you using the phrase looper? I‘ve only used the direct looper so far (switch in the middle).

2 Likes

I haven’t. It admittedly seems intimidating to me at first glance, but I am also having more fun and my hands full with single effect application. That is an excellent video though. It covers a lot of important points with this pedal, some of which have been mentioned in this thread. Namely some effects work better with some sources, and that dialing some of the parameters all the way to 100% results in samey sounds.

That automation section is also wonderful. I have had similar joy with sending CCs from Ableton. This pedal has actually made me use the DAW a lot more, because it’s very easy to set it up as an external effect and send individual tracks from Overbridge to it on demand. Another example I have is that some of the parameters also work chaotically good when their respective CC’s are targeted with Elektrons over MIDI tracks. I have been targeting things like activity on my Digitakt in ways that are not humanly possible through regular hand motion and it opens up a new dimension to the pedal.

1 Like

After analysing how it works, I’ve found that I can make a pretty good ‘homage’ effects rack in Ableton to do the same…

With Ableton’s new v11 features, the Chance feature and all the Random effects modules , both midi and audio, you can make something that does the similar and fixes a lot of the issues. Beat Repeat, Redux, Low Pass Filter (and high pass which irritates me about the MC) and Reverb all play a part.

I can use an External Instrument and route my analogue synths from my mixer into Ableton as an effects unit.

2 Likes

Great to hear that. Would be really interested in hearing some of the results you record with it!

I posted a video on here somewhere of me playing a gig last weekend - Microcosm absolutely key - the output of my Verbos modular system runs into it & does live looping under MIDI clock ( from a Digitakt which is itself sync’d from a Beatstep Pro ) is integral

never had any noise issues at all, but I do tend to only use the supplied PSU

1 Like

I think I should brush off the OT again, done a ton of things with it over years, but never really used it for resampling live and then chopping/glitching the audio up.
Clearly it’s not going to be anything like the Microcosm in ease of use or the variation across it’s many modes, but it might give me that slightly generative & randomised angle I think I was looking for in the Microcosm

With all the Neighbor tracks you’ll need to reproduce 1 algorithm of the MC, you might run out of tracks to load a single sample :wink:

1 Like

I wouldn’t even attempt a full recreation of the Microcosm algorithm(s), that would likely be futile and disappointing.