Ugly Guitar Truth: TC Electronic 3rd Dimension Chorus

TC Electronic showed us the next line of their smorgasbord line of effects. There were several interesting things to note. Probably the most noted was the chorus. We are so used to looking pedals with some arrangement of knob that when we see something the 3rd Dimension it is quite striking. A pedal with the non-familiar shape and size of the new TC boxes with four push buttons instead of our trusty knobs. Is this a better way to do chorus? Maybe, maybe not, but let's take a look at it.

Reboxed Behringer?


At first glance, this pedal looks to be a direct reboxing of a Behringer Chorus Space-C with one glaring exception that we'll talk about later. TC is now owned by Behringer's parent company, so they have been put to task taking care of the most repeated complaint of the Behringer effects, their plastic boxes. So now these pedals have a case that, along with a poster a Raquel Welch, could easily aid your escape from prison. To me, the new box seems to be a serious upgrade to the Behringer. Maybe "upgrade" it too strong a word...

Where's the Stereo?


Both the Space-C and the BOSS DC-2 it was based off of took a single input and provided two outputs. However, the 3rd Dimension doesn't provide the 2nd output. Personally, I don't run a stereo rig or stereo effects, so it doesn't really effect me much, but many people do, and those people would benefit from a faithful reproduction of the classic chorus. However, let me remind you that TC teased a Juno-106 type chorus, and people lost their minds. That pedal was also mono.

Limited


The first question I asked when I saw a push button pedal was, "But, how do I dial-in my tone?". Watching the video the TC put out, Tore talks about spending hours fine tuning a chorus sound. Help me out here, but has anyone spent hours doing this? Most of chorus experience has been CE-2 based, so there wasn't much to mess with. I'd think that four buttons lacking any label, other than being numbered, would be harder to tune than clearly labeled knobs, but that would be an unforgivable deviation from the classic... shm.


Conclusion


To the average player who is not worried about the heritage of there chorus, this is a very interesting pedal. The demo that TC did sounded fine. I'm not a huge chorus user, but it can add a little complexity to your sound when needed. I probably won't pick one of these up. Not because I don't like the 3rd Dimension, but because my Lyon (by Washburn) chorus is meeting my chorus needs. Plus... it's Stereo.