The Ultimate Guide To The Chorus Effect

The ultimate goal of a chorus effect is a dry and clinical sound. If you want a simple effect that lasts, grab a chorus pedal that’s designed to last a long time. And don’t let the number “0” scare you off — some pedals have a huge range of loudness, but don’t stomp into a screaming siren if you want to either dull or capture the sound of a concert. Finding the right chorus effect for you depends on how you want to use it, your budget, and how much control you want out of it. Up next: How to make your own custom chorus pedal. The first step is to pick out a guitar pedal. Some will sound amazing, some won’t and stay sharp for a year. Learn the name and function of each pedal, and you’ll be fine. Below, I’ve chosen a few that are pretty close to my own taste and price range. You can also check out my own personal favorites using the search box at the top. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. It’s good to experiment to find the one that makes you the happiest…and it’s much easier to pay someone to customize a pedal than to pick one up and modify it yourself. Before we talk about how to customize your pedal, we need to talk about the circuits at the heart of every pedal. They all have one thing in common; they generate a constant current to turn on and off.


The name of the pedal doesn’t really tell us much except that it’s used for making descending lines (paraphrased — not exactly the same as a chorus effect). This might not sound terribly important at first but it does open up this effect to potential players. Common chorus patterns include a six-note ascending pattern repeated 6 times, a three-note descending pattern repeated 5 times, and a two-note descending pattern repeated 3 times each. While a simple use, there are songs on the guitarists resource page by artists like Mr. Big that are built entirely around a developing lead vocal melody, like this: Blog post excerpt: This chord progression and accompanying melody can be found on the Mr. Big’s “Together” video. When the guitar player sustains the chord the melody changes with five beats of the right hand and three beats of the left, which creates a dense descending line that when played through the pedal works wonders. Examples: Blue Oyster Cult, Go Like Nosie, Spoon, scourge of the day, plucked string quartet quartet All that said, there’s nothing inherently cool or special about the design of the pedal. I’m not necessarily a fan of pedals that look more like a gadget than a musical instrument but every so often a pretentiousness that I enjoy shines through — I can totally get behind this pedals figurative name.


Clap carries a lot of resonance. If a guitar is tuned properly, claps can push the strings in a completely different direction as other pitches do not carry enough resonance to sustain notes. Not all parts of the neck are tuned to produce claps. Blog post excerpt: Yes it is more complicated to play claps without knowing the intervals. Yes we’ll need tricks like note-pressure mapping — and that’s before you even start trying to figure out where the claps are being hit. You may want to use a few basic chord changes to generate the real claps that people can recreate accurately. Yes you might need some kind of wind noise or an echo device to simulate the resonance. But the rewards far outweigh the complexity of this process. Paragraph Topic: The hacking community has made the bridge between fuzz tones and chorus impressive to say the least. Some of the most popular builds are from TSUM (TL;DR, version 2.0), Octave Crunch Tone, and Dan Sidora’s Tone Socket. Other popular builds owe much of their success (or at least the price tag) to Muff Wobble. Muff Wobble was the guitarist/bassist for the progressive metal band Decapitated.

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