The Twelve Days of Chorus - Part 3

When you add something to a rig, you really don't want to have that new item take something away. Honestly, I used to think that Eric Johnson's ears were probably OCD the way he described how certain effects needed to placed far away from each other for noise reduction, cables that were to thin or too bassy sounding, different batteries sounding different in different effects.

Then it happened to me. I retired my aforementioned Fender Ultra Chorus and got a Fender Prosonic Tube 2x10. Boss/Roland always did the best chorus, in my opinion, as they kind of perfected that effect for the masses, so I got the Super Chorus CH-1.

My Mesa V-twin was retired and I used the Prosonic's overdrive (and at this point it's the only amp I regret parting with), the aforementioned DD-3, and a VOX Wah. But as soon as I plugged the CH-1 into the signal path, something happened. The top end of my entire sound lost about 20%. I was perplexed. I checked cables, knobs, tubes and each pedal to come the conclusion that this CH-1 pedal just sucked the tone out of my signal. Bummer. I kind of did without it, and I didn't really have any issue playing with no chorus. I returned it to Guitar Center, thanks to their liberal return policy.

I mentioned this issue to a friend, and he suggested a Danelectro Cool Cat Chorus. Danelectro had made a comeback of sorts, with some cool retro style guitars, and some effects pedals that had nods to the past. Their Dan-echo was very tape delay esque, and I heard good things about their overdrives being natural. My friend said it was as close to a Boss CE-2 that you could get and not break the bank.

So I got one of the Cool Cat Chorus Pedals. The design was very retro looking, and only had a speed and "chill" knob. I Set the Speed to like 10%, and the chill to maximum. There was no tone suck at all. I was kind of amazed that a newcomer (as Im sure someone just bought the danelectro name) got the tone beat. The effect was nice and spacious, and if it was cranked it still had a musical warble that was nice and jucy. It had a special power supply (18V) and in the days before Multi voltage pedalboard power supplies being common, the extra wall wart on my pedalboard was kind of a bummer, but my friend was right, it was very CE-2 like. Years later, when I got my hands on a real CE-2, I did a quick comparison. and it's hyper close. Eventually I sold the cool cat, but it's a great value for the $.