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.
| Ambient | Blues |
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| The Good | The Bad |
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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.
Major Surgery
I can't believe that I totally forgot to write about this. About a month back I was installing a Scumnico from SouthBay ampworks (Jim is a super awesome guy) into my amplifier. Since I'm a bit of a tinkerer I wanted to solder the speakers in because I hate those awful spade terminals that the manufacturers use. Direct connections just work so much better anyway--as we will discover further evidence for in a minute. After performing this minor procedure I put the amp back together and turned it on. The tubes lit up--one of them flashed at me as european tubes do--and I hit the standby switch. Total darkness. No sound. Uh oh...
After some careful thought experiments I figured that I had not soldered the connections to the speaker spades correctly, thus resulting in no load on my output transformer (an open circuit) and consequently frying it. So, feeling like a complete idiot, I called up Will Loftin at Orange USA and scheduled a repair time. I took the amp guts in to the headquarters located here in Atlanta and luckily Will identified the issue immediately. The connectors from the hot wire to the heating pads--a component that sends current to the vacuum tubes--eventually fails due to the type of connectors used. These connections are facilitated by cheap plastic spade connectors. The spade terminals will oxidize over time and cause intermittent connectivity on that terminal--which when we are dealing with higher current values results in a tiny and very hot arc welder. After some time, the heat from the arcing electricity will melt the plastic connectors, killing the connection to that pad entirely. No current to the pad equals no current to the tube, which equals no sound.
So how do we fix this? Simple. Will soldered in the connections to the heating pads directly. Fixed forever. Will indicated that this is a common problem in the model of amplifier I am using (AD-30R combo). I understand cost cutting, but designing a product such that it will eventually fail is just ludicrous. You cannot tell me that the intelligent people over at Orange's engineering department didn't think that the plastic spade connectors would never eventually oxidize and melt.
Since I was already going to have to pay labor for the point-to-point wiring of the heating pads, I asked Will to upgrade my output transformer to a mercury, re-cap the entire amp, and solder in any spade terminal connections that could be safely and practically wired that way. A couple of days later and I walked into the shop and there my amp was--completely custom wired and working like it's brand new. The moral of this story? There is some validity to the extended reliability claims of a point-to-point wired an amplifier. Beware of companies who use this as a marketing gimmick, however. It doesn't take much longer to solder in a connection than it does to crimp a spade connecter and I do not consider it worth a 15% increase in MSRP.
Overall I'm extremely pleased with the results and with the folks over in the Orange USA shop. The amp is orders of magnitude quieter than it used to be; the only audible buzz is due to the preamp tubes that I am using, and the tone is phenomenal! If any of you out there have an Orange AD-30R (or any other commercially produced amp) I would highly recommend at a minimum getting the heater pads and the output transformer point-to-point wired with some high quality wire. I also recommend that you pay your local amp tech to take care of it since that's the safest route.
Updates to the Music page
In addition to the Gear page renovations, I have updated my Music page as well. It's cleaner, sleeker, cooler, and matches this theme so much better. Speaking of, I'm really digging the new theme. Very tweak able, yet minimalist. Anywho, head over to the Music page and check out the changes. Don't forget to rate my stuff!
Updates to the Gear page
I have spent quite a bit of time revamping my gear page. I added info links for all my guitars and amps. I'm currently in the process of updating all of them with specifications, pictures, and sound clips of all my cool gear! Not that anyone particularly wants to sound like me (I'm not that famous...yet) but my goal for this page is that if someone wants to emulate my tone they can go to this site and find a comprehensive list of the mojo.
If you're bored, cruise it.
Telecaster Upgrades
Following my Firebird upgrades are changes to my Telecaster. I wanted to return to my Tele roots by taking out the P-90 I had installed and going with a Lollar Tele special set. Also, I wanted to install a mini-toggle switch to allow me to switch the pickups into series for some added oomph. Overall, I must say my technique on this project falls as the best wiring project I have ever done. All the joints are clean and crisp, and I picked up some technique from looking at how other builders wire their guitars up. I have no buzz or noise in the circuit at all. I'm a little proud of that =D. I had some initial problems with the switch because it's not the standard switchcraft I'm used to, and you have to wire it slightly different.
Unfortunately, I'm not quite happy with this configuration yet. I used a 500k pot for the volume and a standard 0.47 mF tone capacitor and I think it sounds way too bright. I'm going to swap out the volume pot for 250k and the tone capacitor for 0.22 mF to hopefully warm the guitar up a bit.