View other reviews for this product:
King Loudness « Nice classic chorus unit. »
Published on 01/31/12 at 17:36The BOSS CE-2 is one of the original chorus units made by BOSS in the early eighties. It was the first chorus made by the company to be put into one of their classic stomp box casings and it has a nice simple control layout as well. The two controls are pretty basic, rate and depth. They basically adjust the speed of your chorus effect (from slow to fast) and how intense the effect is (from very light and subtle to very heavy and dramatic with lots of pulsating tones. It's housed in the very durable BOSS casing and being that there are so many of these still in use today, it's a testament to their rugged construction.
UTILIZATION
The setup of the BOSS CE-2 pedal is pretty simple. The controls react as one would expect, and the chorus tones are nice and rich. BOSS was one of the pioneers of a very full and shimmering chorus tone overall and this pedal certainly has that. It's a very bright and glassy sound that really works for making the clean sounds of a guitar really sound excellent. Whether you're using it for chord work or some lead lines it reacts very well and feels good.
SOUND QUALITY
This pedal seems to sound best with single coil pickups from my experience. It really helps to take a Strat or Tele and just add some more glassy shimmer to its tone. Since those guitars are inherently thinner, this pedal can fatten the tone up a little bit with its rich chorusing, which is nice. It sounds fine with humbuckers too but I did find that things could get a little bit muddy with too much output coming from the pickups. This pedal definitely was made for cleaner amp tones. I particularly like it for those nice funky/jangly chords a-la Andy Summers or for some eighties power ballad type tones. You can use this pedal with distortion, but it will get kind of muddy, so unless you're going for a really grainy, washed out effect, I would stick to using this CE-2 for clean tones.
OVERALL OPINION
All in all I think the BOSS CE-2 is a great version of the archetypal stomp box chorus. It is nice and simple, yet sounds great for bringing some new life to clean sounds. They haven't been made for quite some time, and are becoming a bit of a collectors item, but they're definitely worth it if you want some true and original chorus tones in a nice easy to use package.
UTILIZATION
The setup of the BOSS CE-2 pedal is pretty simple. The controls react as one would expect, and the chorus tones are nice and rich. BOSS was one of the pioneers of a very full and shimmering chorus tone overall and this pedal certainly has that. It's a very bright and glassy sound that really works for making the clean sounds of a guitar really sound excellent. Whether you're using it for chord work or some lead lines it reacts very well and feels good.
SOUND QUALITY
This pedal seems to sound best with single coil pickups from my experience. It really helps to take a Strat or Tele and just add some more glassy shimmer to its tone. Since those guitars are inherently thinner, this pedal can fatten the tone up a little bit with its rich chorusing, which is nice. It sounds fine with humbuckers too but I did find that things could get a little bit muddy with too much output coming from the pickups. This pedal definitely was made for cleaner amp tones. I particularly like it for those nice funky/jangly chords a-la Andy Summers or for some eighties power ballad type tones. You can use this pedal with distortion, but it will get kind of muddy, so unless you're going for a really grainy, washed out effect, I would stick to using this CE-2 for clean tones.
OVERALL OPINION
All in all I think the BOSS CE-2 is a great version of the archetypal stomp box chorus. It is nice and simple, yet sounds great for bringing some new life to clean sounds. They haven't been made for quite some time, and are becoming a bit of a collectors item, but they're definitely worth it if you want some true and original chorus tones in a nice easy to use package.