I have been having mine for a while now and, though I haven’t spent so much time using it (well, still a good 6 to 10 hours), I have been having mixed feelings: it does crazy things, for sure, but the problem for me is knowing exactly how, what and when it does it. I might be a control freak, but I like to design my processing very carefully, and the manual has somehow left me in the dark.
My intention was to use this pedal mainly on beats, although it’s probably not its primary purpose. This proved quite frustrating as I did get good results, but they were very difficult to reproduce or keep in control.
These last couple of days, however, I have been seeing the light, as I could at last use an algorithm (Tunnel) in a useful way.
I don’t know, I should probably dedicate more time to discovering and getting used to it.
Does anybody have the same feelings about this effect?
I’m late to the party…
Did you make that spreadsheet?
Do we think the microcosm is actually more comparable to the blooper or the mood?
At first, I thought it might be the blooper slayer. However, the demos bring moodiness to my mind rather than bloopiness… (though the CBA sound stands alone).
The ‘cosm videos I’ve looked at so far are very long, a little fanatical, and I haven’t seen one that emphasizes the behavior and capabilities of the looper. (Suggestions?).
I have a blooper, but I’m not in love.
I think it’s unapologetically a “guitarists first” effect, (which is fine). As a result, though, the midi setup is a hassle for those of us that initially rely on our tabletop midi (e.g. Elektron) gear, as opposed to those who have a Morningstar, or similar, on the floor already.
I was considering trying to flip the blooper for a ‘cosm, but I haven’t gathered enough info on the looping capabilities. (Literally fell asleep last night looking at the docs).
Blooper with Electron midi is great! Love it. Using OT through a MIDI Hub with the blooper on the desktop.
I’ve not found nearly enough looping demos due to the massive number of other effects and micro loops on the thing. I don’t have much sense for the phrase looping side of it either.
I have a Blooper and a Mood, and I’m still thinking of a Microcosm. They’re all different enough, and certainly inspiring enough. Yes, I’m a sucker for generative things.
TBH I haven’t had a lot of time to play with mine, in part because I’ve been reorganizing my studio. I’ll have some time next week, though, and I’ll see whether I can post some drum loops, synth patterns, atmospheres. There are plenty of shoegazey guitar demos on YouTube, so I won’t bother with that. The drawback, as stated above in the thread, is that the algorithms are pretty opaque, so basically you have to just twist knobs and see what sounds good…
Well I would say it does really cool stuff, but it does it on its own, and it’s hard to reproduce, which is a problem for me. I made MIDI automation patterns (on my MnM) to try and tame it, and it improved things, but MIDI control often drops out after a while (the issue might come from my setup, though).
I’ve used my microcosm almost exclusively with the model:cycles.
It’s great for adding ear candy to my beats.
As was asked above: yes, it’s quite unpredictable but I’d you stick with a few of your favorite algorithms you’ll get a feel for controlling what you want.
At first I was switching algos all over the place and didn’t know what I was doing. I stuck with one for a long time and now I feel like the box has been tamed somewhat
I’ve had the MC for some weeks now.
Here are some thoughts, flaws, requests about it.
The Microcosm is a very interesting beast and indeed it takes some practice to become friendly. I mainly use it with Midi clock which makes it definitely more practical for my use and understanding of it.
The pedal has great possibilities and is pretty well thought in terms of controls. Some are still dodgy though like controlling the speed of the recorded loop with the same button than the time of the effect: if you want the speed set at 8x but the timing of Fx divided by 8, you’ll have to cross all the intermediate values to reach it.
Some FX seem a bit similar (Sequencer 1 is like a simple delay, i’d put it in the Delay section like Pattern) and some functions are desactivated or behave differently according the FX.
Some FX are a bit frustrating: there is some bit reduction but it obeys to a sequence and therefore it is not always on. So if u want some… be lucky to play only when it shows up.
The Glide Fx for instance is not as interesting as it could be due to a lack of control. It sounds a bit like a siren so if you don’t go for a 70’s dub style, i dunno what to do with it. It coukd have been use as a auto whammy with bit more control on it.
Some flaws i had:
In some conditions, it doesn’t take any input as if there was no sound. It’s mainly when i feed it with drum loops.
If i change presets and try to hear the dry sound i got a loud artifact which doesn’t go away even changing presets. Then i need to unplug/replug to find back a normal behaviour.
When i use MIDI on the Octatrack and record a looper (with the button on the MC) it happens sometimes that the MC don’t answer anymore neither to MIDI nor to its own buttons. I go back to normal behaviour after using bypass on/off.
I’m trying to use MIDI tracks of an Octatrack to launch a looping on the MC. So far i need to send 2 Midi CC to start recording. I could never get the looper to just loop and launch simply (maybe due to the OT).
It seems the MC reacts to a change of value, not to a simple value.
I’d like to control program changes as well but it seems impossible with the OT…
Some presets (haze or multidelays for instance) contain a reverb in the patch.
There’s no way to turn it off even with the reverb button. I guess it’s on purpose?
I really would like the Wet/Space/Repeat knobs to cover a full range including zero. To be able to have pure wet sound, no repeats or infinite, no reverb on all FXs would add a lot to the possibilities.
Volumes of Wet Fx are not the same. If you switch from an Fx to another you might have a surprise in live situation.
There’s click and a pause in the sound whenever you switch the PreFx mode on/off. That makes it not usable in live situation, that?s a pity.
I would also like the ability to save Midi configuration within the preset. Sometimes you want to use a different port or for another song you’d like the MC not to receive or send the BPM without having to deep dive in the configuration mode.
That’s probably the longest message i ever wrote on this forum but it’s due to the vast possibilities of the MC
Still a great pedal, endless hours of sound sculpting.
The customer service has been amazing with me, very reactive.
Hopefully they’ll correct some things in a firmware update.
I just sold mine. Listed it on Reverb for $455 + shipping and it sold in under 24 hours. I could of probably asked for more but I really just wanted to recoup as much of my expenses on it as possible. (Plus I’d of just felt disingenuous to ask for more $$$ when Hologram is taking preorders on them again).
I literally used mine once. I just wasn’t that impressed with it, and I had recently bought the Empress ZOIA beforehand which went beyond my expectations for reverb and looper FX. I am finding the learning curve for the Microcosm to be way higher than expected, and the FX are a bit too unpredictable for me.
Don’t get me wrong–I love unpredictability, but there is just a lack of control and consistency I found when switching between FX modes that I don’t get with the ZOIA. And I just don’t have it in me to deep-dive into the Microcosm and figure it all out right now. If anything, I think all the ambient-tape-looping-feedback videos of Microcosm that I watched on Instagram enticed me to blind-buy it.
Furthermore, for the price of the Microcosm, it was so darn light! Feels like the box is almost hollow. Just disappointing since a stompbox style pedal should feel heavier. Lack of rubber feet on the bottom (as I was ranting about previously in this thread) is also a negative for me.
just an update:
my affection for the blooper has increased significantly.
I’d been having a problem with midi syncing for nonsense reasons.
Since working that out, it’s easier to see why CBA pedals are really special.
There’s quite a bit in that tiny little case. Taking the plunge and flipping the dip-switches in the back opens up so many possibilities.
Also - I referred to it as a “guitarists first” pedal. This might be true, in the designers intent. But again, after you start screwing around with the dip-switches and experimenting with ramping and modifiers, it operates like a synth.
Interesting to see you say that in a post where you also reference the ZOIA.
The ZOIA has been near the top of the “stuff I want” list for months, but never quite gets to the top because I keep asking myself “do I really want to learn this thing?”
So do you find the ZOIA very easy to work with, or just in line with the (high/med/low?) level of effort you expected, or something else?
Thank you for asking. Maybe both? Although ZOIA is such an extensive piece of hardware, I merely just watched/scrolled through less than 10 minutes of a Youtube tutorial–enough to get the ball rolling with just using the FX modules and chain them together–and was on my own from there.
I still have yet to deep-dive into ZOIA (i.e. watch an entire Youtube tutorial). There are still so many things for me to do with it and yet I have barely scratched its surface. But the little I know about its features thus far has been enough to keep me interested and routinely use it since I purchased mine over this past summer.
Think these things either fit your mindset or not. I lacked visual clues with Zoia, yet picked up Pure Data pretty quickly for Organelle (though wanted instrument level input to make that work in every workflow for me). I’m trying Poly Digit / Beebo next as seems to do address both these issues.
Good thing is that they all keep their value if you don’t get on with them.
The Poly Digit/Beebo is super easy to use. If you’ve used something like Reaktor Blocks or VCV Rack it’s pretty straightforward. Some aspects of the UI are a bit fiddly (and there are occasional bugs), but the firmware updates are very frequent, with new modules getting added all the time. It doesn’t have as extensive library of user patches available as the Zoia though.
Yeah, Poly easiest from seeing stuff so that’s reassuring. The Zoia library is big but I only found a handful of great ones and others would crash when trying to use them to work out patching. Just didn’t work out for me.
Last thing I’ll say about ZOIA: it feels like a true pedal, in that it’s heavy with a sturdy metal exterior. Empress mainly makes guitar and bass pedals, and ZOIA definitely takes after that while perfectly bridging itself into the world of electronic synthesis.
And to bring things back on topic: the Microcosm is a light, hollow box that I was too afraid to stomp on. And when I tried it with my guitar, I couldn’t find a single sweet spot where I wouldn’t want to tweak the filters / settings / etc. again. The Microcosm feels single-use to me–electronic gear only–while the ZOIA goes back and forth between my pedalboard and my synths.
Obviously these are my own preferences for my setups and playing style. Also, I just want to clarify that the reason i’m contrasting these two pedals in particular is because they seemed to frequently come up together when I was in the market for a multi-FX pedal (specifically with reverb and looping) …especially on Instagram with ambient electronic enthusiasts.
what is the deal with only 16 presets… I can’t freaking understand why these pedal developers are putting all of this great work into creating these extremely creative pedal/ instruments but then give you only 16 slots to save the millions of presets you’d want to save if you spent any real time with the pedal and enjoyed what you were doing…
I’ve got a pedal by a dev that shall remain nameless and I love this pedal but to save more than a handful of my own presets I gotta take it over to my desk with my compooter on it and use the damn editor… I hate having to do that!!!
