So many of its sounds are tempo based and lots of other tempo based pedals don't have midi, so this is a huge plus. But I am excited to be able to perfectly sync it to my DAW's tempo. Quantized looping sounds cool but I haven't yet played with that. You do have different looper configurations, like placing it pre fx or post fx. I know a lot of people use looping a lot for their playing but I haven't used many loopers to really know what is good or bad in a looper. From what I have tried though, it works pretty well. They are also for the global configuration of the pedal.Īs of yet I have barely used the looper.

They represent user banks and patches, if you are in normal or reverse effect mode, when you have triggered an effect, the tempo of the effect as it plays, rate and depth of modulation, as well as just an on/off effect indicator light. The 4 bars of colorful lights in the middle actually tell you a lot that is going on with the pedal. Most effects are still present when you put all knobs to zero so you would still have whatever effect going on in the reverb section mixed in with your bare guitar.

The sound quality is there I think, however it is only applied to the wet effected sound and not to your overall wet dry mix. I have seen people ask if you could use it as a main reverb. The stereo reverb sounds great! It goes 100% wet. I could still find uses for all of them, even if sparingly. The glitchy ones are a little harder to incorporate into my music but they are so fun to play with. You can get weird subtle sounds from them as well as bizarre sci fi sounds.

I find myself gravitating towards the haze, tunnel, strum, pattern, and warp effects. With the Microcosm you can get very nice reverse delays that behave how a normal delay would act by having your guitar trigger exactly when the reverse starts. You often end up playing in time with the delay rather than the other way around. Most reverse delays are just constantly cycling through the set bpm and reversing audio that falls within it's grid lines of quarter notes or whatever, which results in slightly sloppy, less than ideal delay sounds. Because of the envelope triggered effects, you can get reverse delays that are much more useable! If you have ever use most reverse delay pedals you'll know what I mean. Every effect can be reversed which is awesome. The majority of the effects are envelope triggered it appears, so you may need to change exactly how you play into it. I LOVE the secondary knob functions that control overall modulation depth and rate. There's 3 or 4 main knobs (activity and repeats being the main 2) that do a lot of the effect shaping, which doesn't sound like a lot of variety, but often just by changing one knob, all the other knobs now behave differently to the new parameter changes. I wouldn't say there's a huge learning curve, just that the main knobs that control most parameters are macro knobs that may control several things at once all based on which effect is loaded. I have briefly run my synths through it but mostly I have been plugging in my guitar. I think this would also be a very good pedal for synthesizers. I like to play/make shoegaze music and I can hear tons of good sounds for that. It is beautifully weird and unpredictable! There are a lot of sounds I haven't heard other pedals make. Here are some of my thoughts on the pedal. Ok so I finally got my Microcosm and have taken a week or so to try and wrap my head around this thing.

Microcosm pedal hologram