Flanger used to be one of my favourite guitar effects but for some reasons, my Arion SFL-1 flanger was sitting among my spare pedals since at least three years. Now I’m recording some parts originally written with flanger (some weird flanger-phaser-delay arpeggio thing), I’m looking for a new flanger unit that would sounds better than the Arion. Well, the Arion sounds great but it has thie metallic vibe and some kind of wah effect. Something more organic and smooth would fit better the music I make today. So, here are some contenders :
The holy grail of flangers? The A/DA Flanger – Vintage or reissue, maybe the best choice but quite expensive! :
Electro Harmonix Electric Mistress – Pink Floyd vibe… But the reissue model is definetely too huge! So a vintage model would be a good idea if it was not getting harder and harder to find…
Another contender would be the Ross R60 Flanger – It seems to be a very popular model but quite hard to find, even more in Europe.
At last but not least, I found the Maxon FL301. Maxon is a brand I really like and this model seems to fit what I’m looking for, here’s what Maxon website says :
The yellow FL301 Flanger produces the wide-sweeping vibrato and jet-like effects characteristic of the 70′s analog boxes. One of the downsides of flangers is that many of them can add noise to the signal, and some are noisier than others are. The FL301 isn’t as noisy or tinny-sounding as 70′s flanging effects were; you do hear the sweep in the background, but it’s tolerable. The FL301′s controls include Speed, Width, and Regeneration. The effect has a delay time of 1 to 12.8 milliseconds and a speed frequency range of .06 to 13 Hz to construct an assortment of usable sounds from slow and subtle sweeps to one with fast and intense vibrato.
Not that easy to find neither as it’s discontinued, I don’t even find a good picture of this one but I have the intuition it could be a good choice as well…
Feel free to share your flanger recommendations, your favourite models, etc… The quest for sound never ends…
[...] I wrote it in my last blog entry, I was looking for a new flanger unit. After some searches, I found a used, discontinued Maxon [...]