Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

King of Chorus? The Retro-Sonic Stereo Chorus

I never really thought chorus would be my thing until I started playing with a Retro-Sonic Stereo Chorus. The sweet swirly tones I was getting was nothing like the cheesy chorus of the late 70's and all throughout the 80's. I really had thought that hair bands killed chorus--until now. I later purchased an Analogman Bi-Chorus for reasons to be discussed later and I am completely satisfied with my choral aresenal. I even bought a phaser and a vibe because modulation is just so swirly good. Here I'd like to pit two of the best choruses (chori?) on the market--the Analogman and the Retro-Sonic--against one another in an attempt to discover: who is the king of chorus and will thereby ascend to his rightful place on my pedal board? First let's take a gander at Retro-Sonic's contender.

Retro-Sonic Stereo Chorus

The Retro-Sonic chorus is a basic clone of the old Boss CE-1, but with a nice twist. In addition to the single, chorus knob that controls both the speed and depth of the chorusing, the Retro-Sonic model includes a vibrato section for faster, leslie tones. In the vibrato stage you can control both the speed and depth of the chorus--which helps you dial in those perfect leslie tones, and there's a switch to swap between the CE-1 mode and the vibrato mode on the go during a gig. The tone of the Retro-Sonic unit is a superbly dark and ominous analog chorus. This chorus will go from slow skin crawling and pitch bending to spot on leslie warble--all with the stomp of a foot switch. Clean tones sound beautiful, and dirty tones sound great too. One of my favorite tones is a slow pitchy modulation with the gain dimed on my amp. My only complaint is that you cannot control both rate and depth of the first chorus stage--but this is indeed an accurate replica of the CE-1 by that design.

Check out the following two clips for a demonstration of all modes of the Retro-Sonic chorus. In the ambient clip, I start out with the bypass signal, move into the CE-1 mode, and then into the Leslie mode; near the end of the clip I engage the series pickup switch on my Telecaster for a variation in tone. The blues clip has a leslie tone dialed in on the vibrato mode and is played entirely on the neck pickup. Both clips were recorded on my Telecaster plugged directly into the effect, and then straight into my Orange AD-30R.

The above table outlines the good and bad points of this unit. In summary, it's a super good budget CE-1 that sounds like a million bucks. If you're looking for beautiful vintage chorus tone, but you can put up with the CE-1 controls, this is your perfect chorus. It will do absolutely everything you want.