How to Use Chorus to Widen Your Guitar Sound
Whatever style of music you play, chances are you always want your guitar tone to sound bigger and wider.
Typically in the studio we can achieve this by double tracking guitar parts to get a thicker sound, often with different guitars and amps to fill in any gaps in the tonal spectrum.
In this article we’re going to learn a really simple method of widening your guitar tone using a single amp and a chorus pedal.
What is Chorus
Chorus is a type of guitar effect that belongs to the Modulation family of effects. It emulates the sound of multiple instruments playing together at the same time which can cause micro shifts in pitch and timing.
Chorus works by duplicating your guitar signal and slightly detuning one side of it. This is controlled usually by a Depth control. You can also change the rate of a chorused signal which controls the speed the detuning works at. Slower speeds are more natural, higher speeds are choppy and more intense.
How This Method Works
When you double track guitars, you get a natural chorusing effect because the two guitars, although playing in time, will have slight timing and pitch movements between them, which creates a thick sound.
Using a chorus pedal allows you to simulate this same effect with a single guitar. When using the chorus effect, you want to keep it very subtle. On the St. James Plugin the Chorus pedal had three controls:
- Speed – Controls the speed of the effect
- Depth – Controls the depth of the picth modulation
- Width – Controls the stereo width of the effect
To achieve a thick tone without sounding like you’re using a chorus pedal as an effect, you want to keep the speed and depth as low as possible so that the impact of the pedal being on is just audible. This is where you her the tone thicken. You can push this up a little further if you want a slightly looser feeling wide tone.
In the case of this chorus effect, you also have a width control. You can set this to taste to determine just how wide you want the sound to be.
————————————————————————-
About the Author
This article on how to use chorus to widen your guitar sound was written by Leigh Fuge. Leigh is a professional guitarist and content creator and also works alongside musicteacher.com to create guitar focused, educational and entertainment content.
If you’re looking for a guitar teacher in your local area, check out their music teacher database to find your local teacher today. Each teacher has their own local page such as Guitar Lessons Camberwell. Find your local teacher today!