Some effects pedals are designed to color your sound. The Chroma Console is designed to transform it.
From the moment I unboxed the Chroma Console, it was clear this wasn’t just another multi-effects unit. Created by boutique builder Hologram Electronics, this dreamy, visually striking pedal is a full stereo sound-shaping workstation that fuses vintage charm with forward-thinking DSP wizardry. It’s lo-fi and hi-fi all at once—quirky yet deliberate, unpredictable yet precise.
And in a world overloaded with gear that promises to do everything, it’s refreshing to find a box that encourages you to do something weird.
First Impressions: A Console From Another Timeline
Physically, the Chroma Console is a stunner. It looks like a control deck from some forgotten ‘70s sci-fi film: a vintage slightly off-white paint job, friendly color-coded knobs, and a symmetrical layout that invites curiosity rather than intimidation. Its four color-coded sections—Character, Movement, Diffusion, and Texture—each offer a distinct flavor of processing, from warm saturation to tape drift to lo-fi modulation.
And it doesn’t stop there. Even the packaging is gorgeous—thoughtfully designed with matching artwork, typography, and color schemes that echo the pedal itself. Opening the box feels like unwrapping a piece of art. Hologram Electronics poured love into every visual detail of this unit, from the enclosure to the printed materials.
It’s hand-built in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the build quality reflects that boutique ethos: solid, heavy-duty switches, a rugged enclosure, and crisp screen-printed labeling. I immediately got the sense that this was made by people who love sound—and want you to love it, too.
What Is The Chroma Console, Exactly?
At its heart, the Chroma Console is a multi-effects processor with 20 custom stereo effects divided across four modules. But this is no ordinary chain of reverbs and fuzzes. Instead, it’s a deeply interactive playground built for experimentation and improvisation.
Each effect module is inspired by a particular slice of vintage audio history—cassette tapes, analog phasers, early samplers, broken compressors—and Hologram has imbued them all with quirks and imperfections. The pedal encourages happy accidents. You can reorder the modules in any sequence, capture 30-second loops on the fly, and even introduce “drift”—random modulation instability—to give things an analog, humanized wobble.
With the Chroma Console, the goal here isn’t sterile emulation. It’s character.
A Closer Look at the Effects
Character (Orange Section) – Dynamics & Distortion
This module is all about analog heat. Whether you’re after a gritty fuzz, creamy drive, or soft compression, Character has you covered.
- Drive gives you a warm, tube-like overdrive with just enough grit to make synths or guitars feel alive.
- Swell turns clean signals into dreamy fade-ins, perfect for ambient pads or reverse-sounding guitar leads.
- Sweeten, Fuzz, y Howl round out this section with options that straddle the line between tonal glue and chaos.
You get two controls here: one for sensitivity or tilt (a kind of tone/EQ), and one for how much of the effect is applied.
Movement (Yellow Section) – Modulation
Now things get wild. Movement includes classic effects like vibrato, tremolo, phaser, and pitch shift, but all of them are stereo and dripping in analog-style richness.
One of the most compelling features here is Drift. It adds randomized instability to modulation speed or depth, mimicking the inconsistencies of old tape decks or malfunctioning pedals in a beautifully musical way.
If you’ve ever wanted your signal to feel like it’s melting in the sun or floating underwater, Movement will get you there.
Diffusion (Green Section) – Delay & Reverb
This section includes five ambient and time-based effects:
- Cascade offers an analog-style delay with warm, crunchy repeats.
- Reels is a tape echo simulation that gets darker and wobblier as it decays.
- Space provides deep, lush reverb textures with a cinematic feel.
- Contrarrestar gives you backward echoes that feel like bending time.
- Collage is a lo-fi glitchy delay with pitch-shifting elements.
Texture (Blue Section) – Tonal FX & Destruction
Last in the chain by default, Texture lets you mangle your signal or subtly sculpt it.
- Filtrar lets you low-pass, high-pass, or tilt your signal into a new shape.
- Cassette adds wow, flutter, and tape compression.
- Squash is a brutally aggressive compressor/distorter.
- Broken y Interference generate unpredictable artifacts—drops, static, noise, and other experimental textures.
This module is especially effective when used sparingly to add atmosphere or unpredictability to otherwise clean tones.
Interface & Workflow: Designed to Be Touched
Despite its complexity, the Chroma Console is a joy to navigate.
Every effect is controlled via two knobs, and each knob has both a primary and secondary function. You can access secondary functions with a quick button combo, and the controls are intelligently labeled and color-coded. There’s no screen, no menus—just tactile interaction. It’s old-school in all the right ways.
You also get a foot-controlled capture looper (up to 30 seconds, stereo) and the ability to save 80 presets. MIDI integration is deep, with full CC control, tempo sync, and preset switching. The I/O supports stereo routing and switchable input levels, making it equally at home on a pedalboard, in a synth rig, or a DAW-less studio setup.
What It Sounds Like
In short: nothing else. But if you want to see for yourself, here’s a demo:
The Chroma Console can do standard modulation, delay, and distortion—but it shines brightest when you don’t play it safe. Feed a beat through Reels and Movement, then once you’re comfortable with the weirdness, take it through Fuzz and Filter. Or, take a simple loop, add Drift and pitch warping, and you’ll suddenly find yourself scoring a dream sequence in a Lynchian arthouse film.
I feel guitarists will love it for ambient swells and shoegaze textures. Synth heads will adore its stereo processing and modulation depth. Drum machine users will appreciate how it can turn boring loops into living grooves. And for DAW-free creators, it’s an analog-style sandbox that keeps you off the screen and in the zone.
Why I Love It
I appreciate the Chroma Console for the fact that it can work its magic on just about anything. Sure, this is theoretically true of any effects console/pedal that takes a 1/4″ input jack, but what makes Hologram Electronics’ creation so great, is how thanks to its different levels of calibration (or its easy auto-calibration), audio fed through Chroma Console isn’t just leveled properly, it sounds great.
Regardless of what you throw at it, it comfortably adapts to any inputs, meaning it’s perfect to add that extra character to your projects, without investing in 20 different pedals to find that “right sound”. Chroma Console finds that character you’ve been searching for, in a very convenient, desktop-sized package.
Real Talk: Massive Thanks To Reverb
I got my hands on the Hologram Electronics’ Chroma Console thanks to the amazing folks at Reverb, who helped make it possible. The Chroma Console has been a ridiculously popular pedal on there, so much that it was featured it on their best selling pedals of 2024 list. Additionally, while this product was brand new straight from the manufacturer (as they sell directly on Reverb), I’ve found Reverb to be invaluable when it comes to used gear as well.
In the past, while browsing for vintage and/or used gear, I’ve leaned heavily on the Reverb Price Guide—an absolute gem of a resource.
Most recently, I was eyeing a vintage synth online, and not being an expert on what these older synths should cost (example: did you know some old synths from the 80’s like the CS-80’s are worth over 30,000? I didn’t), I headed on Reverb to check what the synth I was wanting to buy had sold for or been listed for over the history of the site. Thanks to the Reverb Price Guide, I could compare recent sales and saw it had been consistently selling for several hundred less, even in “fair” condition. That knowledge saved me from making a costly impulse buy off of nostalgia, when I could find it on Reverb for decently less.
Being able to buy with confidence, and knowing what gear is worth based on condition and market history, is invaluable. Especially when it comes to boutique pedals like this one, where as demand soars and people seek out used models, it could potentially sway wildly in price and availability.
And it’s also fun to roll the dice sometimes and see what kind of quirky, old synths you can find on there. Sure, sometimes in the case of the CS-80 you may need to sell your car to afford it, but perhaps you’ll also find a far more reasonable vintage find, that doesn’t require you to take a second mortgage on your house. It’s worth a try!
The Verdict: Who Is This For?
If you want a creative partner that responds to your touch, changes with your mood, and occasionally surprises you in ways you didn’t expect? Chroma Console delivers.
It’s one of the few pedals that truly invites exploration, and the longer you use it, the more it reveals. Whether you’re a guitarist, synth lover, sound designer, or DAWless jammer, it fits in beautifully.
Reflexiones finales
The Chroma Console isn’t just an effects unit—it’s an instrument. It rewards curiosity and thrives on imperfection. And in a world where everything is increasingly polished and pristine, that’s a beautiful thing.
Thanks again to Reverb for helping me add this gem to the AltWire studio. If you’re considering picking one up—or any piece of gear for that matter—check the Reverb Price Guide first. It just might save you money… or help you discover your next favorite tool.
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