Flanger

The jet-plane effect that gave flight to many a classic guitar tone

Like its signal-doubling brothers chorus and phaser, a flanger manipulates your guitar sound by duplicating it, and tweaking the copied signal within its circuitry before playing them back alongside one another.

The development of the effect is largely credited to Ken Townsend, a studio engineer at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios who worked with The Beatles. Ken simultaneously played two versions of the same sound back on separate tape machines, while applying pressure to the ‘flange’ of the reel on one deck in order to speed up and slow down the playback.

In the case of a flanger pedal, things work in a very similar way to a chorus effect. Your guitar signal goes into the pedal, gets duplicated, delayed by a very short amount (around 10-15 milliseconds) and is then blended back in with your original signal.

The delay time is constantly shifting by a tiny increment, creating the distinctive ‘woosh’ sound. Some pedals include a ‘static’ mode, to override a pedal’s LFO sweep, instead giving you a ‘fixed’ position flanger, and the sound of a flanger effect can become more or less pronounced when using it with distortion by changing the pedal order (before or after your drive). For some examples of classic flanger sounds, check out The Police Message In A Bottle, Van Halen And The Cradle Will Rock and Pantera Cowboys From Hell.

The development of flange is largely credited to Ken Townsend – an engineer at Abbey Road Studios