Small Clone

Chorus is a simple trick. The pedal takes your signal, makes a copy, delays the copy by a sliver of time, and keeps nudging its pitch up and down. Blend the two and one guitar sounds like two that aren’t quite in tune with each other. Done gently, it shimmers. Done the Small Clone way, it sloshes.

Vig didn’t dress it up when he described it:

As for that kind of washy sound on ‘Come As You Are’, that was an effect that Kurt had, called the Small Clone, which is basically just a flangy chorus box but with a very distinctive sound. It’s really kind of wide and watery. Not subtle, put it that way.

Then he made it bigger. Vig double-tracked Cobain’s guitars on the song, two passes through the pedal stacked on top of each other, so the wash spreads even wider across the speakers.

Put on “Come As You Are” and listen to the guitar in the verses and the pre-choruses. It sounds like it’s being played from the bottom of a pool. That’s the Small Clone, and that’s two of it.

There isn’t much to work with on the front of the pedal. One knob, Rate, sets how fast the pitch wobbles. One switch, Depth, sets how hard: slight or strong. That’s the whole control panel. A battery goes in the base, or you can run it off a DC adapter.

Inside is the part that does the work, a bucket-brigade delay chip. Think of a line of people passing a bucket of water hand to hand: the signal goes down the line a step at a time and comes out the far end a moment late. Original Small Clones used one of two: the common Panasonic MN3007 or the rarer Reticon SAD1024.

Which one was in Cobain’s? People have wondered whether his was a SAD1024. Nothing is proven, and it’s a good example of how much guesswork piles up around a famous pedal.

The labels varied too. Originals read “Mini-Chorus” or “Full Chorus” on the front, with no real difference in what came out. And keep it straight from its neighbor in the catalog: the Small Stone is Electro-Harmonix’s phaser. Different pedal, different effect, and an easy name to misread in a hurry.

The Small Clone gets credited with a lot of Nevermind, and not all of it holds up. The person who was in the room named two songs. Vig put it on “the watery guitar sound you hear on the pre-chorus build-up of Smells Like Teen Spirit and also Come As You Are.”

So on “Teen Spirit,” listen to the build just before the chorus hits, when the guitar goes liquid and the band gathers itself. That’s the claim, and that’s where it stops. Fan lists spread the pedal across more songs and more sections of that one. Those don’t come with anybody who was there.

Nothing puts it on the vocals, either, whatever you may have read. Vig talks about guitars. And the chorus on Nevermind is this pedal, not a Boss chorus.

It had company on the floor. Cobain had a Boss DS-1 and a ProCo RAT on those sessions, and a Big Muff turned up on “Lithium” for a darker, thumpier sound. And the Small Clone wasn’t only a studio trick: he used it live, too.

Electro-Harmonix didn’t stay dead. Mike Matthews, who had founded the company in New York in 1968, started putting out Russian-made versions of the classic pedals under his Sovtek brand in 1992. By 2000 production was back in New York, with reissues and new designs.

The Small Clone came back too, as a reissue. The new ones all use the MN3007 chip. Some say they sound strikingly close to the originals; others hear a far more prominent effect. Depends whose pedal you’re comparing against whose. Smaller versions followed, the Nano Clone and the Neo Clone.

Electro-Harmonix now describes its own pedal as “a reissue of the classic analog chorus pedal popularized by Kurt Cobain.” The company names, in its own product copy, the player who made the pedal famous on a record cut while the original company was gone.

The factory closed, and the pedal kept going anyway. All it ever needed was a guitar player with one on the floor, willing to plug it in.