A broad range of voices and a clever morph control unlock uncommon ambient reverb sounds that break the same-old-cathedral-verb mold.
Many unusual tonalities that defy affordable ambient reverb convention. High-quality controls. Morph control covers a lot of tones shifting without an expression pedal.
Setting up morph control can feel less than intuitive.
$219
Pigtronix Cosmosis
pigtronix.com
Pigtronix boss Dave Koltai is an energetic guy—particularly when you get him chatting about music. He loves the musical potential of the guitar. And while he seems to have an affection for every kind of guitar expression, from the rootsiest to the most experimental, his heart often seems to be very invested in the latter camp. Pigtronix pedals have always hinted at that affection for out-there modes of guitar thought, and the new Cosmosis stereo reverb definitely exists, in part, to serve those urges. Billed as an ambient reverb, the Cosmosis spans big-picture reverb profiles and more modest ones. And while it doesn’t necessarily achieve anything revolutionary, it features many unique sounds and a cool, practical morph control, which enables users to shift between very divergent settings using a footswitch instead of a space-hogging expression pedal. Together with the many spacious voices on tap, it helps make Cosmosis a varied and versatile time-warping device.
More Cosmic Pig, Less Space Hog
On the surface, Cosmosis’ morph control might not seem like a big deal. But as I am often tasked with getting the most possible sounds from a pedalboard that shares a suitcase with two weeks’ worth of clean clothes, I can attest to the impracticality of expression pedals and the value of effects that do more without them. With its longitudinally oriented, rectangular layout, Cosmosis doesn’t exactly have the smallest footprint. But while you could argue that a similar set of functions would have fit in a vertically oriented box, users would have paid a penalty in functionality and practicality onstage. Cosmosis’ control layout is smartly spaced, logically laid out, and pretty easy to suss before you ever touch the manual. Tone, blend, and size controls are exactly what they seem, and they’re sturdy, smooth-turning things that are satisfying to the touch. The three small push buttons, which, perhaps, look a bit too much like the black screws holding the enclosure together at the pedal’s crown, enable switching between the pedal’s three primary voicings, four presets, and the parameters governed by the morph control.
Sorting out the functionality of the morph function takes a few minutes with the manual. Getting a feel for the switching sequences required to select and assign values can feel awkward, if only because the possible combinations are so many. While many pedals with the ability to move between settings via expression pedal can only assign that movement to a single effect, the Cosmosis' morph function allows any combination of parameters to be manipulated simultaneously. And the compound tone shifts you hear between the two extremes in many Cosmosis morph cycles can be exceptionally rich and nebulous.
Returning the Mystery to Space
The Cosmosis’ morph feature is made cooler for the varied voices the pedal puts at one’s disposal. With a voice called “temple,” you’d expect the kind of churchy, choir-like, octave-up tones associated with ambient reverb. At their best, these octave-up sounds can evoke organ tones or add lushness to overdubbed layers. At their worst, they sound like sickeningly sweet, cheap cable-sci-fi soundtracks. And the Cosmosis trades the octave-up ambient reverb technique for a smoother-sounding processing that uses just harmonics to create the reverb image. And an effective, wide-ranging tone control means you can bend that high-frequency-harmonics content to much weirder ends. At its highest extremes in the temple and even more spacious cosmos settings, the tone control adds almost granular washes that sound like the electromechanical clangs from a spring reverb taken to unnatural extremes. At some lower tone settings, the Cosmosis tucks high octave content into much more subliminal spaces, which is especially cool for adding faint illumination around the edges of foggy, extra-wet, super-spacious temple and cosmos settings.
The Cosmosis’ most demure settings are fun to work with. too. There are many convincing spring-like settings that run from subdued to splashy and metallic ’60s tones. And room-style settings can give any instrument a touch of intimate Fleetwood Mac Rumors glow.The Verdict
The Cosmosis is, delightfully, more than the average generic ambient reverb. While it can generate the high-harmonic-bedazzled textures many look for in an effect of this type, its rangy and interactive tone, space, and blend controls generate octave-up colors that are uncommon and mysterious. The sounds you can create between the modest theater settings and the grandest cosmos settings span mellow room- and amp-reverb sounds and tones that evoke spaces measured in light years. The useful morph function, meanwhile, enables the player to shift between such extremes with dramatic effect. And while some players will lament that there are only four presets, that number can accommodate hugely variable tones if you’re clever and creative. At nearly $220, its price falls in line with comparable ambient reverbs. But its unique tonalities and features will make it a superior option for many players seeking less-common routes to space-time contorting bliss.
Which also happened to be used by David Gilmour, Bob Marley, the Police, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and more!
Some vintage gear carries the patina of both age and history. That’s the case with this month’s featured amp: a 1964 Marshall JTM45 4x10 combo that was owned and played by Peter Green during his years with Fleetwood Mac, and potentially with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
It is a beast! This amp looks beautifully stage-worn and breaks up quickly, offering a throaty growl that sounds nicked from the studio tracks for “Rattlesnake Shake.” Output is 30 to 35 watts, but trust me, I was sitting in front of it when the sound sample you can hear online was recorded, and it bellows like a bull elephant.
The JTM45 was Jim Marshall’s first amp design, inspired by Leo Fender’s Bassman, and the model was just a year old when serial number 7217 was built as a combo with four Celestion 10" alnico speakers, now aided in their gnarly tone by decades of play. Marshall used RS De Luxe transformers, and the two preamp tubes in the ’45 are 12AX7s/ECC83s, with a third as a phase splitter, verses 12AY7s in the Bassman. That combination of preamp tube and transformer give the JTM45 it’s un-Bassman-like snarl. The amp was also built around KT66 output tubes and a GZ34 rectifier tube, with yellow-brown capacitors—so-called mustard caps—in an aluminum chassis. The control array is tremolo speed and intensity, presence, bass, middle, and treble, plus loudness for each channel. There are two channels—treble and normal—with four inputs, so they can be jumped with a short cable to add hair. And number 7217’s original channel switcher box is intact.
Photo by Max Raymond
Green’s amp was recently acquired by Eliot Michael, the owner of Rumble Seat Music—one of the holy trinity of world-class guitar shops along Nashville’s 8th Avenue. It sits along one of the store’s walls, with two certificates of authenticity above its head. I asked Michael what he’d tell a potential buyer making a query about the amp. He replied, “The person I purchased it from runs Ronnie Lane’s old studio. This was used in that studio. The Who used it, the Rolling Stones used it, and it was purchased from Fleetwood Mac when Peter Green was in the band. From what I was told, Peter didn’t have the money to pay for a certain thing, so the amp was left to them as payment.”
Photo by Max Raymond
“Them,” in this case, appears to be Fleetwood Mac’s accountant, David Simmons, who provided one of the certificates. According to Simmons, he took the amp with him to work with JAD Records and Bob Marley, and it was used for several Marley sessions. Simmons gave the amp to Mark St. John, and it began service in a variety of studios St. John partnered in, including London’s Freerange, the Basement Studio, 145 Wardour Street, and the Smokehouse, as well as Ibiza’s Studio Mediterraneo. It was also used for projects done via Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio. St. John’s certificate adds that other artists and groups who used this amp include David Gilmour, the Police, Arthur Brown, and Eddie Grant. “The amplifier is pretty much entirely original and has not been restored or altered, with only simple maintenance being applied to keep it operating correctly,” he wrote.