CBIC “Drunken Choir”

Bending Guide

Top board that houses the pots and LED. Blue, Pink and Red points connect to POOs on the main board

Using This Guide
Bending Guides show specific bends that we have identified as interesting. Color-coded circles indicate separate bending points that all connect to a common point. We call this the Point of Origin (or POO) and indicate the POO with a circle marked with an “X”.

Occasionally a circle will be marked with a zigzag line . This means that we found it useful to add a potentiometer between this point and the POO.

Suggested Pot Values

Green 1 – 1M
Green 2 – 20k
Green 3 – 100k
Green 4 – 1k
Green 5 – 5k
Green 6 – 5k
Pink 2 – 1k
Orange 3 – 10k
Yellow – 20k
Blue4 – 500k (Not pictured)

We appreciate that this is an obnoxious variety of potentiometer values, but these are the values we found gave us the best performance for each bend. If you don’t want to buy a bunch of new pots, just use what you have.

The 2025 CBIC “Drunken Choir” with switch-based CV control over four bends (Green 2, 3, 6 and 7) and vactrol-based CV control over two bends (Green 5 and Orange 3). Switch-based control uses a 2N7000 MOSFET transistor as a VCA. Vactrol-based control uses the variable resistance of the vactrol as a substitute for the potentiometer.

Built from: Ibanez CSL Stereo Chorus

Number of bends: 12 22

Description: ~~The CBIC is one of three ephemeral builds whose bending guide we salvaged, but whose name and description did not escape the ravages of time. Build one and tell us what we should call it!~~

**New for 2025!**

No longer nameless, and befitted with 10 new bends, we introduce the Ibanez CSL Stereo Chorus “Drunken Choir”. A disgustingly large grab bag of effects, Drunken Choir has a little of something for everyone: Distortion, feedback, tone generation, subtle modulation, tremolo.

This project was also a rare pedal bend with a plethora of effects that benefit from a potentiometer. Possibly the most pots we’ve ever incorporated into a bent device.

With this many pot-controlled bends, the Drunken Choir opens itself up to a large variety of sensor-based implementations, or even control voltage from an external source.