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A NOTE FROM THE DESIGNERS:
Thank you for purchasing a Chroma Console!
In the pages that follow, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about what
Chroma Console does and how you can get the most out of it. But first, it might
be worth taking a moment to talk about why we made this pedal and what it’s
about.
If you’re like us, you may agree that some of the best moments throughout the
history of recorded music have something in common: the “limitations” of a
piece of gear or recording medium were exploited to create something vastly
more exciting than the thing it was meant to do in the first place.
Maybe it’s the preamp on a four-track cassette recorder cranked up so high
that an acoustic guitar sounds like a wobbly Marshall stack. Or it’s a kick drum
mic clipping the desk but nobody cares because the take was good. The
crunchy lo-fi converters on an old sampler, snarling filter on a vintage synth,
or maybe the analog delay that runs away into distorted oscillation just as
the song reaches its crescendo. Pieces of gear, when pushed to extremes,
can sometimes yield unexpectedly expressive results beyond what they were
originally intended to do.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of sitting on the floor, surrounded by a pile
of mismatched gear, twisting knobs, plugging one thing into another just to see
what would happen when they interact. Then something unexpected happens,
and although you don’t know exactly how you got there, your musical intuition
takes over and you’re just interacting with the
sound
—you’re no longer thinking
about the devices at play, or equipment at all.
Chroma Console is our attempt to distill these happy accidents into something
you can use and enjoy every day. It’s not a studious emulation or tribute to any
specific piece of gear, although we’ve spent years carefully researching (and
exploiting) the most exciting “limitations” of beloved gear from many different
eras.
Instead, it’s a tribute to the sometimes messy, sometimes chaotic, but always
exciting things that can happen when you allow yourself to experiment.
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you hear it, and we
hope this helps you find it.
Ryan Schaefer & Jason Campbell
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