Hologram Electronics Chroma Console

Whether it’s sitting on your guitar pedalboard or nestled between your synthesizers, this weird and wonderful effects box oozes vintage character.

Something about the styling of Hologram’s Chroma Console pulls you in. The wedge shape is jaunty, the off‑white enclosure smells of old gear and the primary colours remind me of stripes and logos of the 1970s. It triggers all those nostalgia neurons that get us misty‑eyed and appreciative of the simple things. The Chroma Console is a multi‑effects unit that’s designed to drive movement, eccentricity, grit and vintage instability into your sound. And although it is technically a ‘guitar pedal’, Hologram have opened it up to a wider variety of uses, so for this review I’ll be plugging in both a guitar and a bunch of electronic instruments.

Colour‑infused Multi‑effector

You could see the Chroma Console as a compact pedalboard, a versatile multi‑effects box or the shiny thing you put on the end of your mix. It has obvious controls, great visualisation and a sense that you know exactly where you are. (This is not how I felt with Hologram’s previous stompbox effect, the baffling but beautiful granular and micro‑looping Microcosm, reviewed by Simon Small in SOS September 2022). Here, the navigational clarity is excellent. It’s like they listened to all my frustrated Microcosm murmurings and actively set out to design an interface that even an idiot like me could grasp. Bravo, I say.

Inside the box, 20 effects are organised into four flavours or ‘modules’ and, running five effects each, these modules offer a multi‑layer and multi‑focus road to multi‑effect happiness. The Character module contains drives, preamps and fuzzboxes. Movement offers modulation and pitch‑shifting. Diffusion brings in some flavours of delay and reverb. Finally, Texture provides the overriding vintage vibe. Choose an effect for each flavour, tweak it with a couple of knobs, and you have the chewable sound of distressed gear all over your audio.

The first three modules have two knobs; the last one has a single knob with a global wet/dry mix knob above it. The button beneath the knobs is used to select one of the five effects and lights up colourfully to reflect your choice. You step through them in turn, so you hear each effect along the way to the one you want. That may not be ideal for some users, but the intention appears to be that you build your sound with one effect from each module, rather than trying to move between effects within a module. The knobs control the main parameters, of which there are but a few. Each knob has a secondary function, accessible via some mild finger gymnastics performed on the four buttons, and these are clearly laid out on the black strip that does a great job of keeping you from referring to the manual.

Modularity

In the Character module, we have: the tube‑like Drive; Sweeten, which adds EQ, compression and saturation to a preamp; the vintage‑voiced Fuzz, which then gets a resonant filter with Howl; and finally, Swell, which is a tricky‑to‑master envelope‑triggered volume swell. The top knob controls the Tilt brightness or, its secondary function, fine‑tunes the headroom for more or less distortion.

The tone and responsiveness of Character was superb on guitar, and I felt I could really lean into it. It also did a good job of beefing up keyboard instruments and anything with a bit of dynamics. Drive and Sweeten were particularly thumping on drums, assuming you like things chunky. Away from the guitar, Swell is a bit more hit‑and‑miss, as I could never seem to get enough level to it from a synth without going overboard.

It’s in the Movement module that the effects begin. There’s a Doubler stereo double‑tracking effect. Vibrato gives a nice bit of pitch wobble, while Phaser is that classic swirling ride on a fairground waltzer. Tremolo chops and flutters, and Pitch shifts you up or down up to an octave, with a slightly disconcerting delay. You have control over the Rate and Amount, but all the real magic happens with the secondary level Drift control, which dials in a sense of vintage decrepitude: it injects occasional momentary pitch‑shifts into the Doubler, it pours gooey tape instability onto the Vibrato, it messes with the Phaser waveform, distresses the Tremolo and wrecks the Pitch shifting, even if you haven’t added any.

The Diffusion module is the ambient playground of delay, reverb and general weirdness that Hologram are famous for. Within it, Cascade is a bucket‑brigade delay with some enjoyably ridable self‑oscillation that can quickly get out of hand. Reels is a nicely worn‑out tape echo. Space blends between five reverbs, to give a great range of size and depth. Proper weirdness is found in Collage, a looping delay that seems to happen spontaneously. Playing with the Time knob sets Collage into spasms of granular and back into looped phrases, teasing you by pretending to be consistent before going off and doing something else. Reverse is a tape running backwards, turning what you play inside out. It pitch‑shifts in a similar way to the Pitch effect, which gets really creepy if you mix the dry sound back in.

Drift plays a large part here too. It degrades and disintegrates the repeats from Cascade and Reels. In Space and Reverse, it adds a touch of vibrato, and in Collage it flips the pitch and speed all over the place, into bizarre and haunting occurrences.

Finally, Texture is simpler, more of an overall disturber of your sound, and it could feasibly sit on a mix bus or at least at the end of a chain. Filter is, by default, a tilt filter but you can also set it up as a low‑ or high‑pass filter, with the Amount knob setting the cutoff frequency. Squash is a compressor with overdrive at the extremes, and is the sort of thing you could leave in as a default for ‘glue’. Then it gets more deliberately interesting, starting with Cassette. This evokes memories of Portastudios that our nostalgia‑riddled minds like to call ‘treasured’: beautiful when used subtly and fabulously dodgy when pushed. Broken removes the warm treacle of Cassette to leave in the worn‑out mechanisms of mangled machines. Lastly, we have Interference, which introduces all kinds of glitches inspired by telecoms networks and radio static.

Each module can host one of five effects, and though they run left to right by default, the modules can be placed in any order.

Pulling It All Together

Individually, each effect and each module has a lot of scope for exploration and enjoyment, but the Chroma Console wants you to chain the four modules into a definitive patch. The front‑panel order of things feels very natural, but if you want Space to push a cosmic reverb into the Howl before being Broken and emerging in a Tremolo, you can re‑route the modules in any order you wish.

This all throws up some challenges of how you manage the four modules with your feet, especially as they don’t have individual bypass footswitches. The pedal can store up to 80 presets, which store everything including effects routing, primary controls, gestures and tempo, but I’ve found this to be the least enjoyable part of the pedal. Being able to store presets is great, but the clunkiness of storing and retrieving them not so much. It’s not that it’s difficult, but that it feels too laborious to work well in live performance. You have to hold the Bypass button to enter Preset mode, and then you can shift up and down presets with the two footswitches and then long‑hold to exit with your new preset loaded. That amount of footwork does not lend itself to switching presets in the middle of a song.

As well as MIDI I/O, there’s an expression pedal input that can be mapped to any control.Having said that, there’s a clever way around this. It’s a bit of a compromise, but the more I use it, the more I believe it to be completely fine in the majority of cases. The pedal has a Dual Bypass function, meaning you can set the bypass switch to turn off a selection of modules rather than all of them. That way, you can have your Drive on and drop the Reels in and out, or bring in the Tremolo and Interference, or have everything going and then bypass Diffusion and Texture. Of course, individual bypass controls would be great, but that would make for a much wider pedal. I think what Hologram have done here is enough to mean you don’t have to use the preset system to switch effects while you’re playing.

In Use: Guitars & Synths

Playing guitar through the Chroma Console feels very normal and natural, for at least the first couple of modules: Driving into a Doubler, or Fuzzing into a Phaser is just another day at the office. As a compact multi‑effect it has a good tone, feels warm and full and doesn’t give me too many things to distract me from my playing. Once you engage the Drift, things start getting different. The tug of nostalgia is palpable as you surf through those magnetic vibes. Then, as you push into Diffusion, it’s less of an ambient playground and more of a sticky feeling of festivals.

I was drawn into the Texture side, swapping between Cassette, Broken and Interference because it made everything haunting and gooey.

With synths and other keyboards I jumped straight in with everything maxed out, and it felt like something out of a dream. As I played the piano, I could be wandering through an art‑house cinema, warbling through deliciously trippy environments or listening to faded recordings I made 40 years ago. I was drawn into the Texture side, swapping between Cassette, Broken and Interference because it made everything haunting and gooey. With the time‑based effects, it was the Drift control that got most of my attention. It pushed the sound off‑kilter, tripping up in time and pitch while the music fell apart.

Conclusions

I’ve had a thoroughly good time with the Chroma Console. I could see it being my everyday guitar pedal or knocking around my synths and modular, ready to dip my music in sumptuous tape‑style saturation and instability. There was lots of room for knob‑twiddling and enjoying changing the effects as part of my instrument. The gesture recording gives it a lot of scope for interesting animation and the single loop capture is a nice hidden extra. But it’s also seriously limited in what you can change. Hologram have made a bunch of assumptions over how these effects should go, and if you prefer having 14 knobs to sculpt a single effect, then this is definitely not for you.

The box is simple and easy to use, almost to a fault. The sound is delicious, like pouring honey over your cables, but it’s also easy to overdo. There are times when you’d like to use two effects within one module: if I could put the Drive into the Swell and the Reels into Space, I’d be a very happy man. But the key to enjoying the Chroma Console is embracing Hologram’s curation and sinking into the sheer gooiness of it all.