Sometimes, you try a pedal and it completely turns you off from that type of effect. I thought I hated fuzz as a young guitarist until I tried a big muff, for example. Today, our friend Andy Pitcher challenges my thoughts on one of my least loved effect types… FLANGER!
Andy brought me his beloved Moog MF Flange, a lovely little analog piece that gives you all the analog tools to make a great flanger sound and more. While this pedal is discontinued, the genius designer behind it is now making unique pedals with a similar ‘analog and beyond’ ethos as Ashville Music Tools. I’ve changed my mind before, let’s see if I do again!
Have you ever had your mind changed about an entire effect type because of one pedal? Tell us about it in the comments below!
5 Responses
Flangers are great and come in so many flavors, some not so great but I will skip those.
My hands down favorite is the ADA pedal flanger, slays all other flangers except one The Foxx Rox Paradox TZF which does through zero flanging in the Jimi Hendrix/ Lenny Kravitz style and is near impossible to find.
I recently purchased a Fulltone Choral flanger and it is now my new second favorite for slow, tunnel traveling sounds. The mix and speed range controls help to get it just right. It is also one of the few pedal flangers with a level control. These two are followed by the usual suspects the MXR 117 (always good) and the EHX Electric Mistress. These two are better in their Reticon SAD1024 BBD flavors but the re-issues are very good as well.
Then last but not least is the BOSS BF-2 which is a time honored classic and full of great, classic flanger tones in a compact size because all the other pedals are double size or larger.
Love a slow flange on hi hats
check out toni fisher’s ‘the big hurt’ from 1959….pioneering the flanger..but dunno what they called it then..cheers!
I have a Thorpy Camoflang, a Flange built into a Wampler Terraform and into Boss multi and a BF3. I began with a Mooer flanger. What drew me in was comments that Andy Summers Police sounds were flanger and delay rather than chorus and delay. I love the qualities of the Thorpy but I have 2 issues – it has such a broad sweep I do find it hard to get exactly the sounds I’m looking for and the very shiny face plate makes it really difficult to read what each knob is until you have used it long enough to remember. I’m thinking of getting some cardboard and make a template to put over it.
Flange can seemingly be an almost polarizing effect, but like you touch upon in the video, there are many ways to use it. Personally for me, it is my go to modulation because you can usually get a nice lush chorus type sound. You can usually get a weird vibrato type sound but with its own thing to it.
It’s actually kind of funny, when I was younger I just hated that whooshing aero plane sound from Van Halen but now my go to flange sound is very close to that. I currently am using a Mooer ElecLady which I figured would be kind of a place holder until I could get some version of the EHX Electric Mistress but it surprisingly holds its own. I’m sure I’ll still upgrade eventually but it does what I need it to do.
It’s interesting in that I really don’t use flange relatively all that often but there’s a very specific use of it that I just love and that would be during a verse with the rhythm guitar either playing some power chords in continuous quarter notes or even Eighth notes or faster but just a nice rhythmic groove, it can be great with a simple picking pattern as well but you set a flange with the range/depth pretty high but the speed fairly low depending on the tempo of the song so it has this sound where every bar or every other bar sounds like it’s ascending and then descending. Im sure I didn’t explain that well and it’s certainly nothing new at all but I just love that rhythmic movement and swirling so much when it’s done in a certain way.
Anyway, I digress…. I wanted to ask tho, is it just flange that you weren’t fond of or is there any modulation type effects that you prefer or really like? Cuz I guarantee you that there is a ‘flange’ pedal out there that can probably do that sound for you and so much more whenever you feel like experimenting. The Digitech Nautila is pretty cool. You may or may not love it