Cloning the Rare Boss CE-1 Chorus... Well... Kinda!

There are certain vintage pedals which are much harder to clone today than they were once upon a time. Among these are chorus pedals, flangers, phasers, and basically anything that relied on a specific integrated circuit to do the heavy lifting in terms of audio signal modification. While Moore's Law has continued unabated for over a half century, and despite the fact that modern semiconductors consist of  literally over 100 billion transistors on a single processor die, certain integrated circuits go completely out of production and ultimately become exceedingly rare. 

One pedal design I've always wanted to clone is the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, largely because (I'm sure you'll be shocked) Alex Lifeson used one at one point. However, there hasn't been a decent DIY clone out there - largely because the original uses obsolete Panasonic MN3002 BBD chip, and these are getting increasingly hard to find. PastFX has a clone of the original they've sold for years, but even after cornering the market on MN3002 chips, they're running out. As such they're released a version of the pedal using the more common MN3007 chip. Because of the rarity of the required chips, the MN3002 version runs about $350 US while the MN3007 version clocks in just north of $200 US.