Product Review: T.C. Corona Chorus

This product review is from a company I get super geeked out excited about every time they introduce something new, T.C. Electronics. This time they have got into the boutique guitar pedal market with a whole new series of floor effects. They have they Flashback Delay, Vortex Flanger,Hall of Fame Reverb, Shaker Vibrato, Mojo Overdrive and the one I am reviewing, the Corona Chorus. T.C. is taking on the high end pedal market with these. They are very affordable, as far as top end pedals are concerned, and are very high quality. I am sure most of you remember when I reviewed the T.C. "Polytune" and how blown away I was by it. It happened again with this pedal. Let's get the specs of the pedal out of the way first. I took these from the manual that came with the pedal.

The pedal itself is made of a metal frame, painted awesome green.It has white knobs to control speed, depth, fx level and tone. It has a small toggle switch to switch between chorus, toneprint, and tri chorus. It has a stereo in (which you don't see too often) and stereo out 1\4 inch plugs. You can still just use one for in and out for mono. The back of the pedal has the dc 9 volt 100ma adapter plug and a usb cable in port. The bottom has a thumb/ screw to get to the battery. Inside here there is switches for true bypass, buffered bypass and a kill/dry on and off switch.

When testing the pedal I played through and Egnater Tweeker with a Berkshire guitar. I played with my normal distortion settings first. I also used no other pedals in the chain while testing this. I tried it first with the toggle all the way up on chorus. It sparkled. It is avery clean chorus. I ways playing through a 1 12 cabinet and it sounded like a stack! I had all the knobs at 12 o clock. Messing with the depth and speed knobs changes things alot. The speed seems to have more range than an average chorus pedal and the depth seems to be alot "deeper" too. You can get a wide range of sounds. From a slow sweeping ( and boy does it sweep) to a high paced frantic "alarm" sound. Switching to making the amp clean make the chorus come out even more. I could make the pedal go from a very accurate replication of Metallica's "Welcome Home Sanitarium" sound to anything that I wanted.

I tried the "Toneprint" mid toggle switch next. What Toneprint does is allow you to download via http://www.tcelectronics.com/pedals
to download different superstar guitar players different pre sets to the pedal. I thought at first this would be a task for me. I am VERY bad at doing things like this when companies come out with these things. I found it very easy to do. I just hooked up the usb cable to the pedal and my computer and just followed the instructions and it was a breeze! That's why I love T.C. stuff. They make it user friendly. I did the Bumblefoot, from the current Guns and Roses line up, and a guy I have never heard of called Gutherie Govan Colin (who I know do know....and he is crazy good!). I dug their sounds. The thing for me is I actually got it to work! When you get this pedal try it!

The next setting was the Tri Chorus which is the toggle set all the way down. I tried this one out for a little bit. What Tri Chorus is is a variation of the regular chorus that has three stereo choruses with various off sets for depth, speed, phase and chorus delay time. You get a ton of different sounds from this. So many in fact that in the time that I had the pedal to test, I did not get to all this feature can do. There are some really unique and far out sounds that you can do on this setting. It's not who I am as a player. I can see someone like Will Duckworth, from Radar Cinema, really getting the most from this feature of the pedal.

Let's jump back for a second to what the bypass and kill/dry stuff do that is inside the pedal. I thought these features are great even though I did not use them. According to the manual true bypass is best used when you only have a few pedals and short cords before and after the pedals. Buffered bypass is best used when you have a lot of pedals and long cables before and after the pedals. They say when you use this just buffer the first and last pedal in your chain and it should help improve your tone/sound. Certain factors like active/passive pick ups, cable quality, amp impedance , etc, are a factor. I am curious to hear from anyone who has used this. With buffered by pass you should have kill/dry on. Kill/Dry removes all direct signal from the pedal out put and is the mode to use when the pedal is in a parallel effects loop. Kill/Dry is not an option when using true bypass.

When checking this pedal out I compared it to my favorite chorus, the Boss Super Chorus. Boss to me is the standard for quality. They always last a long time and they are almost always good pedals. The T.C. Corona Chorus is making me retire the Boss. My favorite setting was just on plain chorus. There is so much to this pedal it is going to appeal to a wide range of players is a wide range of playing styles. The pedal is made by T.C. Electronics so you know it is a quality pedal that is going to last a while. Now I am going to have to start comparing the other pedals I review to T.C. ones! We just got a bunch of these in at Rock Bottom and a couple other T.C. ones so come check them out and hear for yourself!!!

check it out from tc electronics youtube page at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6EcWxCSm0