What exactly does a flanger do?

[olaff421]

Looks like he's carrying grapes somewhere...

 

[BerserkerSkye77]

Flanger...it's sort of like a phaser but a lot less subtle. Great for 80's new wave/new romantic sounds though. Gary Numan used tons of flange on the synths on his albums. Like Step said, very similar to a jetfighter. Though if you crank all the knobs on it up it just sounds....really weird. Not much you can do with it though unless you use it at a really subtle setting. Chris Squire uses it on "Tempus Fugit" though. Totally loving all the Tron references, btw.

 

[SFjonstarr]

I was reading about flanging and phasing recently. They showed a graph of the notch responses of both. Flanges have a bunch of notches that are evenly spaced across the frequency spectrum that usually get shifted around by an LFO. The phaser looked similar but the notches were unevenly spaced. A lot of the modulation effects are remarkably similar. I've actually found I've been getting great flanger sounds from the ring modulator in Logic by using a lower speed setting and some light modulation of the frequency. I think it sounds better than their dedicated flanger.