Macrodose® Hüllfilter

Macrodose® Envelope Filter

The macrodose has a host of options, three filter modes (HP, LP, BP), industry standard, and your standard frequency, resonance and depth controls.

This is how I like to use it. A standard envelope filter. It does a damn good at this, plenty of resonance on tap, that even if you crank, doesn't get ice picky (at least with my Dream 65). I've owned a Mutron Microtron III, that I stupidly sold thinking I'd buy the new version, I never did. While the attack and decay of this pedal isn't quite as nice as a quality opto envelope follower, you'd really be splitting hairs to say it is noticeable to all but the most ardant envelope filter fanatics, with the added bonus of a nicer resonance.

The freq control, for those of you interested, goes WAY too low for electric guitar, which is great. I usually run it around 2 o'clock for LP, and noon for band pass, meaning there's tons of room for bass and even keys, or just creative sound design.

This is not even half of what this pedal can do. In addition to your standard envelope filter duties, it has a wide range of LFO shapes, and dynamically triggering LFOs to choose from, my favorite being the Sample and Hold mode.

Now the awesome part of the LFOs is the Warp control, which allows you to morph between two LFO shapes per LFO mode. For example, going from a smooth sine wave to a pinched one, useful for getting the perfect shape for your purpose. In Sample and Hold mode, you blend from a hard stepped S&H to a slewed one, which is why it's my favorite mode.

There's a couple of other general quality of life additions as well that benefit all modes. A volume boost, which is super useful in band pass mode, and a blend control, which helps tame more extreme settings.

So far so good. So what are the downsides? Well, only a few for me. The pedal has a tap tempo control, with subdivision control. Awesome! And no rate control. less awesome... As much as the subdivision knob can help with different speeds, with a few creative modes as well, it really is a pain to get a more granular adjustment of the LFO speed, but that's by in large forgivable.

On the flip side, the pedal is a little finicky about buffers, I found that by placing a Boss TU3 Waza after the pedal in my signal chain, the noise floor is acceptable for a filter. When I have my full board plugged in, it can have all sorts of noise related issues depending on where it was in the chain.

Now, to be fair, I'm using a Cioks power supply, which was not one of the recommended power supplies by All Pedal, which they stressed can affect the noise. So maybe it's because it hates the Cioks power supply, not one to say. But because a simple buffer fixed all the noise issues (the pedal is a little noisy in the LFO modes, but in the envelope modes, it's almost silent even with a gained up amp), and almost everyone has a buffered pedal, I'm not really counting this as a downside. Just be aware if you have a larger chain with a non-recommened power supply, you might need to get clever with a buffer.

So despite a couple quirks with the pedal, the feature set and quality of sound is unmatched by any filter I know. The Float pedal has a similar feature set (and two filters), but is much harder to dail in, was much noiser, didn't trigger in a pleasing way, and had a much harshier resonance character. My old Mutron didn't have as nice of a resonance, but did sound a bit better. It couldn't get a quarter of the sounds the Macrodose could, for only about $50 more, the Macrodose is a no brainer.

Reading online, many people seem to be gravitating towards the Macrodose for an endgame envelope filter. I have to agree with them, this is the last envelope filter you'll buy in the current market.

Like the title says. Virtually all of the classic sounds, plus tons of new variations on the theme, entirely new sounds and lots of whacky fun stuff too.

The macrodose is sweet. I own 3 pedals by allpedal and each one is on my main pedalboard.

This pedal is fun and sounds great. Has lots of cool functionality but the thing I feel it’s missing is some way to control attack and decay time in envelope mode. If the width knob controlled the length of attack and decay that would do a lot for me. I’m able to get some really cool sounds out of this thing but i do feel pretty confined by not being able to control attack and decay.