Nobody buys a CH-1 because it's exciting or sexy. They buy it because it works, every time, for decades, which is exactly why there's a used one on this wall instead of in a landfill. This is the chorus pedal gigging guitarists reach for when they want their clean tones to shimmer without thinking twice, the kind you'll find on pedalboards next to amps that have seen more stages than most bands ever will.

Four knobs run the whole thing: RATE and DEPTH shape how the modulation moves, E.LEVEL blends the wet signal against your dry tone, and the EQ knob is where this pedal earns its keep. Turn it down and you get a warmer, more vintage CE-2-style chorus; turn it up and it gets bright and glassy, with enough headroom that stacking it against depth gets you right up to the edge of vibrato. It's a genuinely flexible knob on a pedal that otherwise keeps things simple, and it's the reason players keep this around even after they've bought something fancier.

The real party trick traces straight back to the Roland JC-120, the amp that started Boss's whole chorus lineage. Run it mono through OUTPUT A and you get the full chorused signal, wet and dry mixed together, same as any standard chorus pedal. Run both outputs into two separate amps and OUTPUT A isolates the pure wet signal while OUTPUT B isolates the pure dry signal, splitting them the same way the JC-120's built-in stereo chorus does, wide, spacious, and genuinely dimensional rather than a gimmick.

Two honest details before you buy. First, this uses buffered bypass, not true bypass, meaning your signal always runs through the circuit whether the effect is on or off. For most rigs that's a non-issue, buffers can actually help long cable runs, but if you're a true-bypass purist building a minimalist board, know that going in. Second, the input jack doubles as the power switch, plug a cable in and it's drawing battery, unplug it when you're done or it'll drain overnight. It's built in the same bombproof metal chassis Boss has used for decades, the kind that survives getting stepped on at every gig for twenty years and still works like day one.