Happy New Year 2026, Pork barrel with Vactrol LFO

[fair.child]

Hello folks, Happy New year 2026!!

This year, I have a personal goal to create a new chorus pedal, though the title says pork barrel which is not new. However, I do want to discuss some ideas and bounce back with you all as a starter

1. Why do I want to do it?
I always have a personal ear lust over a nice chorus and I do have an original CE-2 which is a great pedal. However, after seeing Bonamassa live and Landau often, I come to search for a blue hippo MK2, which is hard to find. So basically, because I see a lot of players that I love have BH MK2 on their chain then that's the spark on me.

2. Why Pork Barrel?
BH MK2 or MK1 is basically a CE-2 with chorus vibrato mod and I really want to go back and study again the porkbarrel or CE-2 original. Basic understanding is already there and I have built tri stereo chorus so I have a further crazy ideas (in an analog way) to start the redesign.

3. Why do another chorus design?
I want to test out the chorus LFO in a manner of slow sine wave where the rate control works not with an op-amp (triangle) wave instead more a sine wave. I know there is Vref on the op-amp network that can do that as well but I want to make it controllable using VTL5C2 or C3, or any type of slow sine wave vactrol (between 1Hz to 8Hz sinewave LFO). I think this is going to be interesting.

So there are some ideas that I write down for starters, any thoughts are welcome (if you're reading til the end thank you)