Mr Black Mini Vintage Chorus

The Mr Black Mini Vintage Chorus is a compact chorus pedal that crams old-school, BBD-style chorus and true pitch vibrato into a tiny package. Announced in May 2019, it is a pedalboard-friendly take on the classic late-70s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, the unit that defined the ensemble chorus sound of the era¹. Where the CE-1 was a mains-powered box, the Mini Vintage Chorus runs on a standard 9V DC supply and takes up a fraction of the board space.

A compact chorus and vibrato based on the CE-1

The Mini Vintage Chorus is a BBD-style pedal, meaning its chorus comes from a bucket brigade device, the analog delay-line chip behind the early ensemble choruses of the late 1970s. Delicious Audio described it as a simple three-knob mini-pedal inspired by those early bucket brigade-based choruses, like the Boss CE-1². Gearnews, covering the launch, framed it as a Boss CE-1 circuit in a mini pedal, and expected "some nice analogue chorusing and true pitch-vibrato tones from this little chorus pedal, just like the original"⁴⁵.

What that means for a player is the warm, dimensional modulation character associated with the first generation of chorus effects, rather than the cleaner sound of later digital designs. The pedal handles both regular chorus and a more trembly pitch vibrato, with the Mix knob moving between them².

The controls

Mr Black kept the control set minimal, with three knobs doing all the work¹.

Because the Mix control blends the wet and dry signal, the pedal covers ground from a subtle doubled chorus at low wet settings to full pitch vibrato with the dry signal removed. That single knob is what lets one mini pedal stand in for the two modes of the CE-1-style units it draws on²³¹.

Power and current draw

The Mini Vintage Chorus runs on 9V DC power-supply operation, with standard input and output jacks⁴. Delicious Audio described its power requirement as daisy-chain friendly "industry standard" 9VDC², so it works with the common pedalboard supplies most players already own.

Current draw is under 60mA⁴, which is modest for a modulation pedal and leaves plenty of headroom on a shared supply. For comparison, Mr Black's later Stereo Vintage Ensemble Professional, a larger stereo unit in the same family, draws 74mA at 9VDC⁵, and the Vintage Ensemble Stereo Chorus/Vibrato that preceded the Mini drew around 68mA⁶.

Origins in the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble

The pedal's reference point is the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, released in 1976 and produced until the mid-eighties⁷. The CE-1 was a full-size, mains-powered unit rather than a compact pedal, and it carried stereo outputs⁷⁸. MusicRadar's chorus pedal buying guide calls it Boss's iconic 1976 CE-1 Chorus Ensemble unit, and notes its later compact-sized incarnation, the CE-2 Chorus⁹.

Mr Black's own later products make the lineage explicit. The maker describes its Stereo Vintage Ensemble Professional as inspired by the Roland CE-1, capturing "the lush, dimensional chorus heard on countless records"¹⁰⁵, and its Black LTD. Vintage Chorus as "specifically designed to replicate that original 1976 'Chorus Ensemble' sound"¹¹. The Mini Vintage Chorus sits in that same line of thinking: take the sound of the 1976 original and put it in a box a modern player can fit on a pedalboard.

The Mini Vintage Chorus was not the maker's only CE-1-inspired pedal. It followed the chunkier Vintage Ensemble Stereo Chorus/Vibrato, a stereo chorus/vibrato pedal with a full wet/dry mix control and delay times carefully tuned to match those of the original chorus circuit⁶. Later, Mr Black expanded the concept into the Stereo Vintage Ensemble Professional, which Guitar Pedal X described as "a Dual Digital Delay Line recreation of the Boss CE-1 Chorus, set out of phase for glorious stereo output"¹⁰, and into the limited Black LTD. Vintage Chorus, which sold out in November 2016¹¹.

What reviewers said

Coverage at launch was positive about the concept. Gearnews wrote, "I have high hopes for this mini chorus effect"⁴. Guitar.com highlighted the contrast with the CE-1 itself: a pedalboard-friendly take on a classic that was never small¹. Delicious Audio noted the appeal of getting old-school BBD-style chorusing and true pitch-vibrato "in a super tiny package"².

No full published review of the pedal appears in the coverage gathered here; the press response is from announcement-period news writing rather than extended testing.

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