Should say that I received this last week and have loved every second I’ve had with it so far. A lot of digging to do yet: looper, MIDI, sculpting my user presets probs but feeding this anything and either using subtly or super-wet can yield stunning results.
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I swear I see so many of these for sale on reverb. I’ve owned it twice and sold it twice. I think it’s a really fantastic pedal. And at the same time, I didn’t have much use for it. I don’t have a point here, just noticing a lot for sale.
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Im getting this aswell. Just record a loop, pre-fx and it (not that) slowly starts to drift. Pretty annoying and im out of ideas to find a workaround to keep the loop synced with the rest of the hardware. Right now only tryed to sync with the Maschine +.
Is there anyone out there that can keep their recorded loops tight?
That’s annoying but no, haven’t yet gave looping a good and thorough run. Have you raised with them? Haven’t yet heard much about their customer service, willingness to update into the future etc
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Yea spoken to several users who are finding the same. Probably there’s no integer counter/restart signal; they’re just chopping to midi clock and looping it. This is always gonna fall on its arse due to midi jitter. Ah well, hope they fix it in firmware one day. They did NOT seem interested when I inquired about it though.
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What’s midi jitter?
Let´s hope they are interested. If it happens to all the units it defeats the purpose of having quantized looping, since well, it´not.
Thanx for your reply 
Let me know when you have tried it out. I´m going to contact them and see what they have to say 
K well not ideal. They basically said “oh no it’s not supposed to do that, it’ll drift relative to other gear”.
Solidly implies in the literature that it does sync. Is shitty wording of manual at best.
GREAT LADS
Also, anyone noticed a massive dropout when loading a user preset? It’s even present in full bypass mode
Here are my thoughts on the Microcosm after playing with it after a few days. I got it second-hand from a local classifieds site for about $500. My feelings are pretty mixed, even though I had pretty much zero expectations going in.
The thing that bothers me the most is lack of control and pretty arbitrary design choices. Like, why are there non-removable LP filters in some of the algorithms, and why does the Space knob control the reverb dry/wet mix instead of reverb time? Why does setting Activity to anything other than square kill high frequencies?
It sounds good, but the overall character seems a bit subdued, with lots of forced LP filtering. Some presets seem to just cut out the high frequencies for no reason, while others have an LP built in by design. The only two real controls are the Activity and Repeat knobs, and even then they are macros, not individual controls. It’s easy to get something that sounds good, but I don’t feel like it’s my doing, it’s more the pedal playing by itself.
I wish there was a separate “thing 1/2” knobs for controlling sub-effects within the presets, like bitcrushing or filtering, since that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
The filter itself is very quantized and steppy when resonance is turned up, with only like 6 discrete values over the whole range, which doesn’t sound good to me. And why the hate for high frequencies? Where are the HP, BP filters? It limits the usability of the filter a lot for me, since I like my high freqs.
The Shape knob I just don’t get. It also seems quantized, with only a few discrete wave shapes, instead of morphing like you’d expect. And even after several days I only have a vague idea of how it affects the sound.
I guess that’s my main gripe with the pedal: with so many unknown variables inside the algos, the abstracted-away controls, and scarce documentation, it’s frustrating trying to learn how it actually works and what each knob does. I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark half of the time. Sounds good, but it’s hard steering into a particular sound direction with any precision.
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^ Bookmarked
Cheers!
Exactly how I felt. I sold it twice. It sounds pretty incredible at times, but it felt like it was playing itself more than I was.
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maybe they are trying their best to control the sweetspot
That’s too bad, really. I like the sound, but I don’t like playing with it that much. I wish it turned out that I was actually wrong and had misread the manual or something, but I guess that’s just the way the pedal works. Oh well.
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I found a lot of these things too. To me, the MC was massively frustrating and massively flawed. I had it for a couple of weeks and sold it. I think the MC was kind of the last straw for me with guitar pedals, and as a result I’ve since got into Eurorack instead! Lots of control there, I love it.
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Cheers Pete! And thanks for the s/o, appreciate the feedback.
But using it more extensively by now I experienced the same things with looping out of sync and also some audio popping - both seem to be quite common issues as I read on Facebook/forums. Really hope they will fix that in a future firmware update.
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Did anyone here who was similarly slightly disappointed by the lack of control in Microcosm play with the Red Panda Particle? I was looking at it before getting the Microcosm, and I’m curious how it compares in terms of control/playability.
But yeah, maybe Eurorack is the way to go if you’re a control freak.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Especially the steppy filter, that’s a bummer.
Last week I was pretty close to putting it on the market.
However, I started playing with the looper, then I started focusing less on the lack of controls for the effects and just letting a loop go and turning knobs.
That was way more satisfying than trying to control the pedal. I’m starting to think this is maybe more what hologram had in mind, and I’m going to try and embrace it.
I waited a long time for this pedal and it was pricey, I want to give it a good fair shake.
I’ve got pedals that have a lot of control. I’m going to try to embrace the methodology of this pedal for a while, I think it might be a strength. It does things my other gear doesn’t do, and it does sound good.
One of my favorite guitar pedals is the Earthquaker Erupter. It’s just got one big knob and I’m not even positive what it controls, but it sounds badass.
The MC might still end up going on the market, we’ll see…
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Using just the pedal effects on their own I’m finding a bit meh after a while. Though building up a loop and then using the Meris Enzo in arp mode into the MC is pretty fun. I was going to sell the Enzo but these two together are great, if a little unpredictable.
This is all on guitar and then sampled into the DT. Haven’t used it with synths yet as I’m a lazy bugger.