Italo de Angelis

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Eventide and other stuff > Dyno My Piano Tri Stereo Chorus

The Holy Grail of chorus units! The “Ne Plus Ultra”!

In the early ‘80s Chuck Monte created mods for the legendary Fender Rhodes electric piano. These circuitry boards were built in the actual Rhodes and many claim that Chuck’s Rhodes was the ultimate one.
Read about the legend here: http://www.fenderrhodes.com/history/dyno.php

Chuck decided to create a dedicated rack chorus unit for the professional studios market and, boy, he did a damned fine job! From the mid ‘80s these chorus wonders have gained mainstay status in the racks of the big L.A. studio scene cats.

Steve Lukhater, Michael Landau, Dan Huff are probably the ones who made its sound happening all over the world, in countless recordings.

My personal preference and taste goes to Michael Landau. His clean Dyno-chorused chords reveal a richness of details and complex modulation texture no other has explored with such taste and depth. His “Tales From The Bulge” tone_seminal recording is Dynorgasm all over the place. You must listen to it to understand what chorus is.

The Tri Stereo Chorus has some hidden secrets within the guts. Its particularly rich and unpredictable modulation comes from the 3 intensity knobs. They actually control the blend of 3 different LFO waveforms sweeping the 3 delay lines. 
Each chorus (one left/one center/one right) can be set on a different intensity, meaning a magic wave that “no longer is/not yet is” a typical sine or triangle or square wave, but a blend of two of them. Something like a “morph”....a word that came in trend 20 years after, in digital technology.

Today these units are very, very hard to find. If you are lucky to get one, prepare to shell 3 or 4 grands. It’s insane! Many companies have tried to re_create the TSC but I have never heard of any truly successful results. Too bad.
In the early 2000s I decided to replicate this baby in an algorithm on the Eventide Orville. I spent 2 years researching for any kind of info on the TSC, from User manual to schematics, recordings, users feedback, anything else. Finally I decided to give it a try and created a monster algorithm, taking the full power of a single Motorola DSP. Analog technology can be very complex and hard to replicate in digital domain.
The algorithm was included in the factory presets library on ORVILLE, DSP7000 and 7500. H7600 and H8000 included it a few years later. I got very nice feedback from users out there. Someone even got so nice telling me he sold his original Dyno ‘cause this replica was too good for him! Wow! To be honest it sounds good but it doesn’t really recreate the full parameters at all settings identical behaviour of the original unit. If you don’t change values too much and limit your tweaks to mod rate and waveforms blends choices, you’ll be ok.

In 2011, while working at the “Michael In A Box” project on H.R.I. forums, I decided the algorithm needed a version 2, with better modulation aura, less predictable and richer in tonal and spatial details. So I re_worked it up and today I can say it sounds definitely better than the older one and closer to the original Dyno TSC.

I’m also adding some images of the Eventide display, showing the Dyno replica parameters.
Hopefully some audio clips will come too. You can listen to it in the “Michael In A Box” project, with some other effects added to it.
 

This H8000FW display image shows the rate parameter, common to all 3 chorus lines and the 3 different choices for the lfos waveforms, originally managed by the 3 Intensity knobs. They can select a single specific wave such as sine, triangle or square OR a blend of sine/tri or tri/square. The blends do the magic!
 

Here you can add some spatial spreading to each chorus line! It’s a subtle effect but very nice to hear when multiple spreads are set. The original unit Intensity knobs could be pulled out to engage the spreads.... so I named them.

Fx type chooses between chorus and flanger. It’s a preset flanger that sounds better at slow rate settings. The effect can be collapsed to mono, switched on/off and dry/fx levels are available for fine tuning.

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