Cosmodio Horoscope plays its echoes like an arpeggiator
A sequencer jumps the delay clock between steps, so Horoscope re-pitches its echoes into arpeggios, Pythagorean intervals or patterns that never repeat.
Most delays treat time as a setting. Horoscope treats it as a melody. The stereo pedal from Cosmodio Instruments, a builder from Bedford, Massachusetts, runs a sequencer that jumps the echo's internal clock between steps, so whatever is still repeating gets squeezed or stretched and lands on a different pitch.
The starting point is a familiar delay trick: jump to a different time division and the pitch moves with the timing. Cosmodio builds a whole instrument around it. The Constellation knob picks which intervals the sequencer walks through, and the menu reads like a music-theory syllabus: stacked octaves, a lo-fi octave pile, perfect Pythagorean fourths and fifths, a just-intoned pentatonic and Ptolemy's intense diatonic scale. Sequence sets the path. Up, Down and UpDn cycle through the whole constellation like an arpeggiator, in the manual's words, while the numbered settings build pseudo-random loops of six to sixteen steps and INF never repeats.
Flip the Precise/Diffuse toggle and the same machinery drives a diffuse ambient reverb instead of a clean delay. Drift works in both directions: left of noon it mutates the sequence over time, right of noon it adds warble and more glissando slides between steps. Feedback has a wide range around unity gain for sound-on-sound looping or endless reverb, and tips into self-oscillation at the extreme.
Cosmodio calls Horoscope a musical kaleidoscope and credits electronic music and synthesis for its quantized arpeggiation and accented glissandos. TRS stereo in and out with an M/S switch covers mono, mono-to-stereo and full stereo. Four presets also remember the sequence position, tap tempo sets the step rate, and any parameter can go to an expression pedal or 0–5 V CV. Bypass is a mechanical relay by default, or buffered with echo trails, as the manual explains. In Manual mode, each press of Tap/Step advances the sequence one step, and it runs on a 9V DC center-negative supply drawing 200mA. Full specs are on our Horoscope product page.
Horoscope is handcrafted in Massachusetts and wears artwork by illustrator Katie Guarnaccia. The maker's product page lists it as in stock.
Video: Cosmodio — Introducing the Horoscope Echo Sequencer
