Chorus is a useful modulation based effect for creating some interesting shifting aesthetic effects in your mix. More practically, chorus allows you to add more size on your track of choice, making it a very useful effect to use on acoustic guitar. With that in mind, let’s talk about how to use chorus on acoustic guitar.
How to Use Chorus on Acoustic Guitar
As I covered in my complete overview on how to record acoustic guitar, having two recorded tracks for your acoustic obviously allows that guitar to sound larger and wider in the mix.
This can be done either by double tracking your acoustic guitar with two unique recorded takes or simply using two (or more) microphones through the XY recording technique or the mid side mic technique for example to capture a single take with more width.
If you don’t have the luxury of multiple uniquely recorded acoustic guitar tracks but still want some width, you can use chorus to replicate that width by faking a similar effect through an automatically automated LFO.
I talked about this more in length in my complete overview on what is chorus, but this is an effect which uses an LFO, or low frequency oscillator (see what is an LFO), to vary the pitch and timing of your source’s audio. When blended with the “dry” or untouched audio, it gives the impression of multiple unique instances of the same part.
While you can simply duplicate a track in your DAW, it will always just make the original track sound louder (6dB, specifically). Even if you manually add some delay to offset it, it still won’t sound convincingly unique. It’s through the automating or ever changing of the timing and pitch which really tricks the listener’s ear into thinking it’s unique, or unique enough to create that width.
My chorus plugin of choice is Arturia’s Chorus Jun-6, in part because of its simplicity. It has two stock settings you can get simply by pressing one or the other “Mode” button (or both).
Either of these will create that wide lushness which sounds great on acoustic guitar.
I’ll sometimes tweak the timing ever so slightly, ticking the “Manual” button to adjust the rate, depth, and phase myself, so let’s take a look at my preferred settings for chorus on acoustic guitar which you can obviously apply to this plugin if you have it, or apply to your own chorus plugin of choice.
Rate
The “Rate” parameter on any chorus plugin or effect is one of the main drivers of the sound and effect.
As I covered in my overview on chorus rate, this determines how quickly the timing and pitch range extremes as dictated by the depth parameter are transitioned between.
Measured in Hz, I like a chorus rate of .4Hz as this is slow enough to not hear it working but enough that there’s some movement there.
Depth
The “Depth” parameter on a chorus plugin or pedal is that aforementioned range which the rate is going to cover. Measured in milliseconds, I like to set this around 4-5ms for chorus on acoustic guitar as this creates enough range to sell the additional iterations and, when paired with the .4Hz rate, you get a very realistic swing of width on the acoustic.
Phase
“Phase” refers to how far removed from the original wave form the duplicated audio is.
Setting this to the “max” of 180 degrees makes it as dissimilar from the phase of the original, so you get the biggest spread and most notable impact of the chorus, which is where I like it on chorus for acoustic guitar.
Note that if this were a literal duplicate with no modulation at work, setting it to 180 degrees would create phase cancellation and essentially mute both tracks, but because of the automated timing and pitch on our “duplicate”, it’s dissimilar enough to create a unique sound (see my overview on phase issues for more information).
Mix
Last but not least, we can’t forget about the “Mix” parameter for chorus on acoustic guitar. As with virtually every effect or plugin in our mix, this parameter dictates the blend between the original audio and the chorus effect.
Setting this to 0% effectively turns the effect off whereas setting this to 100% will exclusively play the chorus version.
To get the proper effect of the chorus on our acoustic guitar, we need a blend of the two.
If you’re using this effect as an insert right on the acoustic guitar track in the mix, I recommend setting the blend around 30%. 50% would be an even split between dry and processed/chorus audio, but I find I get a nice pocket right in that 30% range.
Obviously the lower you set the mix split, the less of the effect you’ll hear, but that width will still be palpable.
If you don’t want to hear the character of the chorus on the acoustic guitar, turn this to around 15% to just get the width, albeit not as much.
Conversely, you can also use chorus as a send via an Aux/Return track (see sends vs inserts) in which case you’d set the Mix or wet/dry percentage to 100%, then simply blend in the amount of the effect you want via the respective send dial on that acoustic guitar track.
Don’t forget to check out my many tutorials on mixing acoustic guitar, including my EQ and compression best settings guide on how to make acoustic guitar sound better to get it sitting just right in the mix.
