Chorus

Parameters

In the browser under MODULATION, the family it opened — between COLOUR and SPACE.

Width and thickness from a delay that moves. One to three voices play the signal back through a short delay whose length is swept by an LFO; because the sweep is offset between the left and right channels, a mono source comes out genuinely wide rather than just detuned.

Controls and display

Width is how far the right channel's voices lead the left, measured as a share of the gap between voices rather than of the whole LFO cycle. That is what makes the knob monotonic: 0 leaves a mono source mono and 180 is as wide as the voices can sit, at every voice count.

What to reach for it for. A thin mono synth, a doubled vocal that sounds flat, a guitar that needs to sit wider without EQ. It is not a tone control (that is EQ) and not an evenness control (that is a compressor).

Mix is the knob that matters. Around 0.2–0.4 it thickens and widens while the source still sounds like itself; at 1.0 it is an effect. High settings smear transients, so it belongs off drums and off any lead you want to stay as a single point in the image. Rate and Depth together decide how seasick it gets — 0.5–1.5 Hz at depth 0.2–0.3 is the safe ground. Width at 0 leaves a mono source mono; 90–180° is where the stereo spread lives. Voices 2–3 gives the classic ensemble shimmer, and does not change your level.

There is no feedback control, on purpose: feedback through a short swept delay is a Flanger, which is its own device (next section).

Surface (the orbit): the RATE knob sits at the centre of a ring, and the ring is one LFO cycle. Each voice is a dot going round it — a filled dot for the left channel, a hollow one for the right, set apart by the Width angle — and how far out a dot sits is that voice's delay right now, breathing between the two faint circles that mark Delay plus and minus Depth. The dots trail a ghost of a fixed slice of time, so a fast rate streaks and a slow one barely smears; the arc on the rim spans one voice's two channels with the width in degrees under it.

Drag outward anywhere on the ring for more Depth. Outside the ring is a scale of note values at the session tempo — one LFO cycle per bar, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth — with the nearest one lit (accent on the grid, amber when it misses) and named in the cell under the knob; double-click the ring to snap the rate to it. There is no sync mode: turn the rate to a tick. In the dock the ring keeps only the knob, the band and the dots.

The middle card is the sweep: two LFO cycles of every voice's delay in milliseconds. It is the shape this setting makes rather than a recording — voice one leads and the others sit behind it — over a wet lane that is a real measurement, the wet voice sum's level before Mix. Depth, Delay, Mix, Voices and Width sit in a deck under it. The right card reads sweep (the delay's real excursion), detune (the peak pitch deviation the sweep induces, in cents: the number you hear as seasick, and it is Rate, Delay and Depth together), period, voices with the reminder that an ensemble costs no level, wet, and the session tempo.

With the device off or nothing playing the dots stand still and wet reads a dash.

The agent may use chorus, but its Mix is capped at 0.5 — it can thicken a source, not replace it. Your own knob goes all the way.