Seymour Duncan dynamic Catalina Chorus

An intuitive chorus that responds to the player’s touch.

It’s been interesting to watch Seymour Duncan’s effects line grow. Pedals like the Vapor Trail Analog Delay strike a nice balance between practicality, simplicity, and thoughtful, performance-centric extra features. The new Catalina analog chorus fits the same mold—thanks in large part to the inclusion of the intriguing “expression” mode, which enables a player to shape the chorus effect with picking dynamics.

The expression mode is a great solution to the problem of chorus effects that can bury picking nuance and sound all-enveloping.

Spinning Knobs, Swirling Modes

The Catalina’s blue-sparkle finish makes it look a little like your Uncle Rick’s vintage jet boat—which is awesome. The nameplate’s font also looks like a badge from an early-’60s Pontiac Catalina, enhancing the unit’s personality. Once the effect becomes active, the top LED lights up bright blue. Engaging the expression feature illuminates the threshold knob. It glows blue if you select soft mode, which increases chorus level in response to a softer pick attack, or green for hard mode, which has an inverse response to pick dynamics. The single toggle switch allows you to change between hard and soft modes, and turning the threshold knob clockwise increases the sensitivity to pick dynamics. The remaining four knobs control rate, depth, delay, mix, and tone. Catalina can only be powered with a 9–18V barrel adaptor.

Ratings

Pros:

Great tones. Expression mode is awesome and works very well with other effects.

Cons:

No battery option.

Tones:

Ease of Use:

Build/Design:

Value:

Street:

$229

Seymour Duncan Catalina Dynamic Chorus

seymourduncan.com

Express Yo’ Self!

It’s easy to get really satisfying chorus sounds from the Catalina. With delay, mix, depth, and rate controls at around 2 o’clock, the Catalina takes on rich, deep, and fluttery rotary speaker characteristics. Some chorus effects do the Leslie trick less well than others. But Catalina is a more authentic-sounding stand-in than most. The tone control also proved invaluable for giving the chorus more presence, which was useful when I was using my dark and bassy Les Paul/Fender Twin combination. At higher tone settings, the Catalina also took on many of the bright and detailed characteristics of my favorite Boss CE-2. At darker settings, the Catalina does a great job of adding deep undulating movement to low frequencies, which can also be used, to some extent, to mimic microphone emphasis on the lower horn of a Leslie.