CHORUSTRINGS

Overview

CHORUSTRINGS bottles one specific, beloved sound: the lush, shimmery “chorused strings” wash of the Alesis Quadraverb’s program #64 — the bright, dreamy ambience of shoegaze and ambient records that impulse responses fundamentally cannot reproduce, because they can’t capture the moving modulation riding the reverb tail. It’s a faithful recreation of the 1989 ChorusStrings family, defaulting exactly to each preset but tweakable around it, reverse-engineered by decoding the factory SysEx dump so the voicing rests on real measured values, not guesswork.

A powered-down unit in Collection IV — The Rack Archive.

Features

• Decoded, not sampled — Built from the Quadraverb’s factory SysEx values: bright parametric EQ → stereo flanger → short stereo delay → hall reverb.
• Two programs — CS 2 (#64): a deep resonant stereo flanger into a long, bright hall (the original target); CS 1 (#63): a gentle non-resonant chorus into a shorter, drier hall.
• Vintage / Modern — Toggle the authentic 1989 lo-fi color (31.25 kHz, ~15 kHz bandwidth, gentle 16-bit grit on the wet path) against a clean hi-fi version of the same algorithm.
• The moving tail — Reproduces the slow, deep modulation on the reverb decay that gives the sound its shimmer — the exact thing convolution cannot capture.