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Home › Forums › The Lounge › Origin of the word “flanger”
on the EHX Flanger page “We don’t know how John Lennon came up with the name Flanger but thankfully he did”
I’d heard that the Beatles would use their fingers on the flange of the tape reel to modify the sound of a double track recording…
Is that right? Does it help with the John Lennon question?
yea, im pretty sure thats how the story goes, or its something similar.
That is how I’ve read it on the internet here and there..
A ‘flange’ is an edge or rim of something, in engineering terms. I think “moving the ‘edge’ of the tape as it runs” sounds perfectly plausible as an origin of the word flanger.
By the way, I’m so much more flanger than phaser. How about you guys?
idk, i think im a bit of both. i used to like flanging a lot more than phasing, but now both are sort of equal.
For me flanging is way more useable than phasing, so yes:)
Both are filters, but the flanger has way more notches. Phaser it’s more dramatic, so, I prefer it to make something rythmical, and I prefer flanging for more subtle things, arpegiated, and the flanger must be subtle, wide, slow, not very resonant (or feedbacked) and sound natural, not metallic.
I’d heard that the Beatles would use their fingers on the flange of the tape reel to modify the sound of a double track recording…
Is that right? Does it help with the John Lennon question?
i’m sure i read somewhere, that an engineer named Ken Townsend(?) at Abbey Road studios actually pioneered the effect… when John Lennon asked George Martin how the effect was produced, Martin gave him a nonsense answer; deliberately trying to confuse him but mentioning something about running the sound through a ‘flange’.
so then, whenever Lennon wanted that effect, he would ask for the ‘flanger’.
Legend has it that Andy Summers used an Electric Mistress to get that GREAT chorus sound.