Wet Dog

What it does

Chorus works by mixing your signal with a slightly delayed copy of itself and moving that delay around, so the two drift in and out of tune with each other. Most chorus pedals give you a speed knob and a depth knob and hide the rest. This one opens all of it up.

That means it will do the ordinary job - a wide, clean shimmer behind a chord - and it will also go somewhere no normal chorus can, with the delay time stretched out and the pitch swinging hard enough to sound broken. The Sea Machine it comes from is known for exactly that range, from lush to genuinely unstable.

Six knobs takes a minute to learn. Start with Intensity low and Depth low, get the Rate and Dimension where you want them, then bring the other two up until it stops sounding polite.

Demo

Controls

Rate

Speed of the modulation, from a slow drift to a flutter.

Shape

The waveform doing the modulating, which changes whether the movement is smooth or lurching.

Dimension

The delay time at the heart of the chorus - short for thin and metallic, long for deep and watery.

Depth

How far the modulation swings. Small is a sheen, large is a full seasick pitch bend.

Animate

How much the pitch swings around inside the sweep, which is where the unhinged end of this pedal lives.

Intensity

Wet against dry. Fully up abandons the dry signal entirely.