CE-2 Chorus

Chorus started at Roland, Boss’s parent company, inside an amplifier. The JC-120 Jazz Chorus came out in 1975 with the effect built in. Then Boss lifted the same chorus and vibrato circuits out of the amp and put them in a box of their own, the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble. Some count that as 1975 and some as the following year.

Here is what chorus does. The pedal copies your signal, delays the copy by a sliver of time, and keeps nudging its pitch up and down. Blend the two together and one guitar sounds like two that are very slightly out of tune with each other. The note shimmers and spreads.

The CE-1 did that beautifully, in stereo. It was also large and plugged into the wall. In 1977 Boss started its compact line, small battery-powered pedals you could line up on the floor, six of them at launch. None of them was a chorus.

That gap didn’t last. Once the compact series was out, guitarists started asking for chorus in the small box too.

The answer came in 1979: the CE-2, a modified version of the CE-1’s chorus, specially tweaked for guitar. Getting it into a stompbox meant leaving things behind. The vibrato went, and so did the stereo output, the volume and intensity knobs, and the built-in power supply.

What was left is about as simple as a pedal gets. Rate sets how fast the pitch wobbles. Depth sets how wide it swings. Inside, a bucket-brigade chip passes your signal along a line of tiny capacitors, a step at a time, and that’s where the delay comes from. One output, mono only. Stereo had to wait for the CE-3 in 1982.

And the sound? A gentle warble that keeps the middle of your tone where it was. Other chorus pedals could get woozy and weird. This one quickly became a staple for guitarists, and plenty of bassists and keyboard players used it too. Chorus became the sound of ’80s guitar, and this box is a big part of why.

Back to New York. When Boss gave Steve Stevens its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025, he named the songs himself:

Where would songs like ‘Eyes Without a Face’ and ‘Flesh for Fantasy’ be without the CS-1 Compression Sustainer and CE-2 Chorus on my guitar tracks?

Notice that he names two pedals. The CS-1 is a compressor, and it shares the credit, so don’t hand the CE-2 the whole sound. But put on “Eyes Without a Face,” the song Stevens co-wrote with Idol, and listen to the guitar tracks around Idol’s voice. It went to No. 4 in America as a single in 1984. Then “Flesh for Fantasy,” the other one he names, out as a single that summer.

Not the title track, though. Stevens didn’t name “Rebel Yell,” so neither will we.

Johnny Marr took the same award in 2021, and he used the moment to thank Boss for the CE-2, explaining how it had been “such a big part” of his sound in The Smiths. His first pedal of his own, back in 1980, was a purple Boss flanger. The chorus came after.

A word of care, though. A lot of Marr’s shimmering sound comes from the JC-120 amp’s own chorus, not a pedal. The two are cousins, and it’s easy to blur them. Andy Rourke, The Smiths’ bassist, used a CE-2 too, alongside a Boss GE-10 equalizer.

Or take the Pretenders. James Walbourne, the band’s guitarist now, says the original guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, used the first Boss choruses, “the big CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and the CE-2 Chorus.” On the classic songs, Walbourne says, it’s “all over some of them.” Which song is which pedal, nobody has said.

In 2016 Boss brought the CE-2 back as the CE-2W Waza Craft. Its standard mode is the CE-2 sound, and for the first time ever you can have it in stereo, the thing that had to be cut to fit it in a small box. A second mode does the old CE-1, chorus and vibrato both.

Players asked for the big chorus in something they could carry, and Boss gave them two knobs and a light blue case. Forty-odd years later Stevens was still asking the same question about his own records: where would they be without it?