Hologram Electronics Infinite Jets: The Pedal That Turns Your Guitar Into A Synth You Can Never Quite Predict

Two guys in a shared house in Knoxville, Tennessee, both of them coming off years of touring in the same band, both of them tired of hauling a laptop and an audio interface and a rack of processing gear to every show just to make the noises they wanted. That is where the Infinite Jets came from. Not from a marketing department, not from a focus group, and definitely not from the traditional guitar-pedal playbook — because the traditional playbook has no page for a box that samples individual notes off your fretboard, resynthesises them into something else entirely, and holds them there forever.

The Infinite Jets does not process your signal. That is the sentence that unlocks the whole pedal, and it is also the sentence that trips up most people who plug one in for the first time expecting a reverb or a delay or a nice pad machine. It listens for the attack of a note or a chord, grabs a slice of it, and then plays that slice back to you as a new sound with its own envelope, its own filter, its own sense of time. Your original note carries on doing whatever it was going to do, on an analog dry path that never touches the DSP. The two exist side by side. You are effectively playing two instruments at once, and one of them is doing whatever it feels like.

Nearly a decade after its 2017 launch it is still in production, still $299, and still one of the very few pedals that will make an experienced guitarist genuinely unsure what just happened. It is also, arguably, the pedal that taught the boutique world that a stompbox could be an instrument rather than an accessory — the direct ancestor of the Hologram Microcosm, which went on to become one of the defining pedals of the 2020s.

The Origin Story: Royal Bangs, A Laptop Rack, And “Something That Hadn’t Been Done Yet”

Two musicians, not two engineers

Hologram Electronics was formed in 2016 by Ryan Schaefer and Jason Campbell. Both had played, at various points, in the Knoxville band Royal Bangs. Both had spent years on the road running the band’s instruments through a laptop, an interface and an assortment of processing hardware, and both had grown accustomed to people asking after shows how on earth they were getting those sounds.

Schaefer has been candid about how the company started, and his framing is worth quoting because it explains the pedal better than any spec sheet. “At a certain point, it seemed like it would be a good idea to try to take some of these ideas I had been experimenting with in software and turn them into a simple thing other people could use,” he told Sinesquares in 2024. “Jason and I were roommates at the time, and we thought it sounded like a fun thing to work on together. Luckily, we had no idea how difficult the rest of the steps would prove to be when we started, otherwise we may not have done it.”

The mission statement, in his words, was simple: “to make something that hadn’t been done yet.”

Dream Sequence first, Infinite Jets second

Hologram’s first product was the Dream Sequence, a rhythmic tremolo-and-arpeggiator device that had no obvious competitors on the market. The Infinite Jets followed, with preorders opening on 15 September 2017. It landed on multiple “Best Pedals of 2017” lists almost immediately, and the response was, if anything, warmer than for the debut.

Both pedals share a design quirk that later Hologram products dropped: they include a genuine analog drive circuit at the output. Everything else in Hologram’s catalogue — Microcosm and the Chroma Console — is DSP throughout. Infinite Jets and Dream Sequence are the two that end in analog.

The line to Microcosm

When asked directly whether Microcosm was inspired by the Infinite Jets, Schaefer gave an answer that neatly places both pedals: “They are both very different in many ways, but there’s a similar guiding principle in that they both seek to expand the bounds of your instrument — turning it into something much larger or weirder than the input.”

That is the Hologram thesis in one line, and it applies to everything the company has built since. Every pedal is assembled, tested, boxed and shipped from Knoxville. Ten years in, they have released four products. They take big swings.

Specifications

How It Actually Works: Calibration, Channels, And Why It Is Not A Freeze Pedal

The step everybody skips

Infinite Jets has a calibration routine, and it is not optional. The pedal tracks the dynamics of your playing to decide when a new note has been struck, which means it needs to know what your particular instrument’s output looks like. Hologram’s manual is explicit that you should recalibrate for each new instrument, and that the process takes seconds and can be done mid-set or even mid-song.

This is the single most common source of frustration among owners. A pedal calibrated to a hot humbucker will behave differently under a Jazzmaster with the volume rolled back, and the symptom is not an obvious error — it is the pedal simply refusing to trigger, or triggering on notes you did not intend. If your Infinite Jets feels unreliable, recalibrate before you conclude anything else. Users who report inconsistency from session to session are almost always describing a calibration problem.

Two channels, and why that matters more than it sounds

The architecture is two independent sampling channels, A and B. Each can hold a note or chord indefinitely. The pedal alternates between them as you play, which means a new capture does not destroy the old one — the two can attack, sustain and decay on top of each other.

This is the difference between the Infinite Jets and every freeze-style pedal on the market, including the EHX Freeze. A freeze holds one sound. Infinite Jets holds two, independently enveloped, and lets you crossfade between them by playing. That is why the standard demo of this pedal is somebody playing a chord progression and watching the harmony reassemble itself behind them without a single button press. In Poly mode with a slow envelope time, chords bleed into each other the way a sustain pedal works on a piano — and most owners settle on Poly as their default for exactly this reason.

Three ways to trigger

Mono — one channel sustains at a time, triggered by your playing. The most predictable mode and the right starting point.

Poly — both channels sustain simultaneously, triggered by your playing. Overlapping harmonies, drones, and the richest textures the pedal makes.

Manual — the A and B footswitches trigger capture, and your playing does not. This is the performance mode: you decide exactly what gets sampled and when. Default behaviour is Toggle, but you can switch to Latching or Momentary by holding Footswitch B while flipping the Trigger Mode switch (left/Poly gives Toggle and yellow lights, centre/Mono gives Latch and red lights, right/Manual gives Momentary and blue lights). Momentary in particular turns the pedal into a stutter instrument.

The Four Effect Styles, One At A Time

Blur — the atmospheric one

Blur freezes the frequency content of your note or chord but strips out the original attack and decay, leaving a sample that can be reshaped from scratch. This is where the ambient pad sounds live: hazy beds under lead lines, chord washes that fade into one another, drones that outlast the phrase that created them.

Besides the standard voicing, Blur ships with +1 octave, −1 octave and ±1 octave variations. The octave-up Blur, in particular, does something no conventional octave pedal does: because it is resynthesising a captured sample rather than tracking your live signal, it does not glitch out on chords the way a monophonic shifter does, and it does not have the polyphonic-tracking character of an EHX POG2. It is smoother and stranger, and it lags behind your playing by design.

In Blur, the Dimension knob controls a blend of delay time, filtering and feedback that changes the perceived size and space of the sound. Automate it and you get pitch bends, chorus and vibrato out of a control that is nominally about “space.”

Synth — the two-voice synthesiser

Synth samples your input and rebuilds it using Hologram’s own DSP synthesis algorithms. There are two flavours. Synth A is hard-edged and digital — the aggressive one, closer to a square-wave lead. Synth B is airy and gently chorused, and Hologram describes it as reminiscent of 1980s synth pads, which is accurate and slightly understated.

In both Synth voices, Dimension becomes a low-pass filter cutoff. Combine that with the LFO or the envelope generator and you have a genuine filter sweep — the classic synth gesture that most guitar synth pedals either skip or bury in a menu. This is where the Infinite Jets sits closest to dedicated guitar-synth boxes like the Meris Enzo, the Source Audio C4 Synth or the Boss SY-1 — and also where the difference is clearest, because those track your playing continuously and the Infinite Jets does not track at all. It samples once and then leaves.

Glitch — the two very different chop modes

Glitch A chops incoming audio into four fixed looping chunks in a predictable way, and Dimension chooses which of the four sample lengths plays back. Predictable is the operative word: this is the mode you use when you want a rhythmic stutter you can rely on.

Glitch B is the interesting one and the reason this pedal has a reputation for being unpredictable. It stores notes and chords across six separate audio fragments and plays them back at random or controlled intervals. Dimension scrolls back through those six stored fragments. Automate Dimension and the pedal sweeps through its own memory in real time, remixing what you played thirty seconds ago — and crucially, any new note you play while automation is running overwrites one of the stored blocks. The pattern therefore evolves continuously as you add and subtract material. It is closer to working with a granular sampler than to using an effect, which is the clearest line you can draw between the Infinite Jets and the Microcosm that followed it.

Swell — volume shaping and violin fuzz

Swell puts the pedal’s dynamics processing to work on volume. Swell A creates volume swells, or repeats the waveform to produce tremolo. The result is fed into a delay controlled by Dimension, which can then be modulated by LFO, envelope or recorded knob movement — subtle tape warble and chorus at one end, extreme pitch-shifted feedback at the other.

Swell B does everything Swell A does and adds waveshaping, which is the setting responsible for the pedal’s cult-favourite violin-like sustained fuzz. Bowed lead tones with no volume-pedal technique required, and above that, genuinely over-the-top distorted lead sounds.

Famous Players: What Is Actually Documented

This is a pedal with a real and verifiable following, but it is also a pedal that attracts a lot of loose attribution, so it is worth being precise about what stands up and what does not.

Lizzie Mayland, The Last Dinner Party — the strongest single case

The clearest documented use comes from Premier Guitar‘s Rig Rundown with English art-rockers The Last Dinner Party, filmed by John Bohlinger at Nashville’s Pinnacle on 10 June 2026 and published on 5 August, on the tour behind their 2025 record From the Pyre.

Guitarist Lizzie Mayland runs two boards. The larger one holds a Boss TU-3, EQD Arrows, MXR Dyna Comp, EQD Hummingbird, EQD Hoof Reaper, Strymon Timeline and Strymon BigSky, with a Strymon Multi Switch Plus, Lehle Little Dual, GigRig QuarterMaster and JHS Mini A/B doing the routing. The second, smaller board holds exactly three things: a Strymon Mobius, a Hologram Infinite Jets, and a GigRig Latchmo X2.

That second board is the detail worth dwelling on. When a touring guitarist gives a pedal its own board with a dedicated latching switcher, the pedal is not a colour — it is a part of the arrangement. Mayland’s bandmate Emily Roberts runs a separate rig built around an Ernie Ball Music Man St. Vincent signature into a Victory Copper and a Vox AC30 in stereo, with a BigSky and a Boss RE-202 doing the ambient work; the Infinite Jets is Mayland’s territory specifically.

The Hologram artist roster — brand-level, not model-level

Hologram’s own artists page lists a genuinely impressive group: Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Yvette Young of Covet, Ariel Posen, Sarah Tudzin of illuminati hotties, Deakin of Animal Collective, Crumb, TOPS, King Britt, Macie Stewart, Spencer Zahn, Bryn Bliska, Hayley Briasco, M Duffy, Tiana O’Hara and Alun Williams.

Here is the honest caveat, and it is the same one that applies to every manufacturer gallery: Hologram’s artist page is a company roster, not an Infinite Jets roster. The company makes four pedals, and Microcosm is by an enormous margin its best-selling product. A name on that page is solid evidence that the artist uses Hologram gear; it is not by itself evidence of which box. Ed O’Brien’s inclusion is entirely plausible given that his whole sonic identity is built on sustained, layered, machine-assisted texture — but the page does not say Infinite Jets, and we are not going to say it either.

Tim Pierce — a name that does not survive checking

Search for Infinite Jets users and you will repeatedly find Tim Pierce, the LA session veteran with a thousand-plus records to his name, listed as an owner on the strength of his Premier Guitar Rig Rundown of 19 April 2023.

Read the actual Rundown and the pedal is not there. Bohlinger’s gear list covers Pierce’s mobile board — Nobels ODR-1, Strymon Lex, Keeley Halo, Meris LVX, Karma MTN-10, modded Boss GE-7 and TR-2, vintage Boss VB-2, MXR Reverb, Fairfield Shallow Water — and his studio rack: Ibanez Mostortion, Vemuram ODS-1, MXR Boost/Line Driver, Way Huge Red Llama, Boss OC-2, Way Huge Supa-Puss, Fender MTG Tube Tremolo, UA Golden Reverberator, Neon Egg Planetarium 3, Ebo E-verb, three Eventide H9s and a Boomerang looper. No Hologram anything.

The Infinite Jets attribution comes from a retailer’s affiliate “shop the rig” page built alongside the video, not from PG‘s editorial gear list. Those pages are assembled by merchandising teams and are frequently broader than what the artist actually named on camera. Pierce may well own one — Bohlinger’s own line is that “Tim Pierce owns (nearly) every tone-tweaking device ever made” — but owning is not the same as documented use, and an affiliate shopping list is not a source. Treat it as unconfirmed.

One correction to the press record

Gearphoria’s 2018 review, still the most widely quoted piece of writing about this pedal, opens by describing it as “an all-analog signal path, two-channel sampling machine.” The first half of that is wrong, and it has been repeated ever since. The dry path is analog and the output drive stage is analog. The sampling, resynthesis, filtering and modulation are all DSP — Hologram has never claimed otherwise, and the company’s own materials describe proprietary digital algorithms. The same review’s publisher also placed Hologram in Nashville; the company is and always has been in Knoxville. Neither error changes the verdict, and reviewer Wade Burden’s actual description of what the pedal does remains the best short one anybody has written: an old-school analog synthesiser that lets you use a guitar as the controller instead of a keyboard and a million patch cables.

Tone Recipes: Eight Starting Points

How It Compares

Buying Guide

New in 2026

The Infinite Jets remains a current product on Hologram’s own store at $299, nine years after launch, with a matte black colourway offered alongside the original white. That is a striking piece of pricing history: no nominal increase across nearly a decade, which in real terms means the pedal is substantially cheaper today than it was in 2017. Buying new gets you the current firmware, the full warranty, and support from a company that is small enough to answer email.

Used

Used examples circulate steadily and generally sell below new price, which makes them a reasonable proposition given there is no significant version split to worry about. Two things to check. First, confirm the pedal calibrates — power it up, run the calibration routine, and verify that it triggers reliably on the seller’s instrument as well as yours. Second, confirm all three footswitches work in Manual mode, because the relay bypass and the A/B triggers are the moving parts most likely to have been stomped for years.

Who should buy one

Ambient and post-rock players, obviously. Producers who want a hardware idea generator that responds to a guitar rather than a MIDI keyboard. Anyone building a solo looping rig who wants sustained material without a looper’s rigidity. Anyone whose problem is not “my tone needs improving” but “I need something to happen that I did not plan.”

Who should not

Players who need repeatability night after night from a set of stored presets — the pedal has ten voices and only two user slots, and no MIDI. Players who want a synth that tracks. Players who want to plug in and have it sound good immediately without reading anything. And anyone who will be annoyed by having to recalibrate when they switch guitars, because that is a permanent condition of ownership rather than a bug.

Ownership Notes

Power, and the thing that catches people out

The Infinite Jets takes a standard 9V, 2.1 mm, centre-negative supply at 200 mA minimum. That is Boss-standard polarity — worth stating explicitly, because several boutique DSP pedals are not, and anyone coming from an Eventide Factor pedal will be in the habit of checking. Hologram recommends a transformer-isolated wall wart or an isolated pedalboard supply output. There is no battery compartment. The 200 mA figure is a minimum, not a typical draw, so do not hang it off a 100 mA output and hope.

Recording and looping knob movements

This is the feature most owners under-use. Hold the centre Bypass footswitch and turn the Dimension knob to record its movement; release the footswitch and the movement loops indefinitely. The MOD indicator turns red while recording. The same procedure works on the Drive knob, with the top-centre indicator lighting instead — and automated drive is one of the more unusual textures available anywhere, because the drive is a real analog circuit under digital control rather than a modelled one.

Hidden controls

Tone and Master Volume live behind Footswitch A. Hold A and turn Drive to adjust Tone, which sets high-frequency rolloff at the output. These are digitally controlled analog stages, which is why they can be stored in a preset.

Saving presets

Hold both A and B footswitches, turn the Voice knob to User A or User B, and hold A and B again to commit. Drive, Tone and Dry settings save as part of a User preset, along with recorded knob movements, LFO settings and every other parameter. Two slots is not many, and it is the pedal’s clearest ergonomic limitation.

Factory reset

Hold both A and B while powering the pedal on. All customisations are erased and the factory preset content is restored. The process can take up to a minute — do not disconnect power partway through.

Placement in the chain

There is no single right answer, and Hologram’s own official position is essentially “wherever it sounds best.” In practice, most owners run it after dirt and before time-based effects, so that reverb and delay treat the resynthesised material the same way they treat the dry signal. Putting it after a reverb feeds the pedal a wash rather than a note, which makes triggering unreliable. If you want the captured voices to sound like they exist in a different room from your guitar, use a parallel loop instead of reordering.

Frequently Asked Questions