Inspired by the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, the EarthquakerDevices Aurelius grabs a vintage box by its throat and shakes out a whole new world of bucket-brigade-inspired shimmer.
It was one bright day in 1976 that the bespectacled boffins at the Boss corporation decided it was about time to surgically extract the chorus section from their widely popular Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amp.
The procedure lasted days, but with the patient wide open on the table they added a few extra features, housed it in its own grey custom unit, and set it forth upon the people.
They christened this new abomination the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, and its modulations soon shook amplifiers worldwide.
Now considered the ‘holy grail’ of chorus units, prices have hit over $1k on this old Japanese unit you had to plug into the damn wall. EarthQuaker Devices have arrived to fix the problem.
EarthQuaker are a classy crew out of Akron Ohio (home, of course, to Devo, and The Cramps) who have been busting out guitar pedals since 2004.
Started in the basement of founder Jamie Stillman, the company have a range of probably more than 50 pedals by time of writing this, covering pretty much any aspect of sonic sculpting you wish to explore.
The Aurelius gives you what is essentially the original chorus unit, with two additional modes just about covering all the good stops across the spectrum of classy guitar effect modulation.
The ‘V’ mode is the fluttery, wet sound of the original vibrato/chorus unit that maybe you’re familiar with ‘cause you found one in a pawn shop, or your old man (or ol’ lady) stashed the one they broke trying to modify to battery power in the 70s.
The ‘C’ mode is a chorus/flanger, slightly more mellow than the ‘V’ in overall tone, but you know, more flanged. And the ‘R’ mode is your rotary speaker mode baked on the legendary Leslie rotary speakers, with combined amplitude and frequency modulation to really hammer home the cool Doppler effect of an original physical unit.
Across all modes you’ve got control of your Width, Rate and Balance. The Width is generally an LFO amplitude control with slight variations across the modes. Rate is your LFO speed, and Balance is largely a wet/dry control with altered appropriate response, again depending on your selected mode.
The final knob on this thing is a preset section which the lab-coats over at Boss never dreamed of in 1976; a section for saving presets. And it’s not one of those pain-in-the-arse plug-it-into-your-computer bullshits neither. All you’ve gotta do is create a setting that stimulates the synapses, select the present slot, and hold down a button. As simple as programming an old-style car radio!
Furthermore there’s an extra jack hole on the side (in addition to the regular in/out and DC holes up the top of this thing) for plugging in an expression pedal, with a real smart, easy method to make it control either the Width, Rate, or Balance controls. Nice!
The Aurelius is a simplistic, yet heavily featured chorus pedal in a real-estate friendly sized 125B-ish enclosure and can be picked up from all good pedal stores for approximately $339 AUD.
For more info head over to Earthquakerdevices.com
