Electric Mistress

Cockerell had good timing. In late 1974 and 1975 new bucket-brigade delay chips arrived, and flanging could finally fit in a box. Studio rack flangers came first. Pedals were right behind them.

In late 1976, ads for the Electric Mistress, the MXR Flanger and the Tycobrahe Pedalflanger ran in Guitar Player at the same time. Who was first depends who you ask. “One of the first” is about as far as anybody can honestly go.

The more useful question is why this one stuck around for nearly fifty years.

Flanging and chorus are the same trick at different delay times. The pedal copies your signal, delays the copy a hair, keeps nudging that delay back and forth, and blends the two. Keep the delay under about 10 milliseconds and you get the jet-plane whoosh of a flanger. Stretch it past 10 and it turns into the wobble of a chorus. Between 5 and 10, it’s a bit of both.

Most flangers give you a Manual knob to set where that delay sits. The Mistress doesn’t. Its center is fixed, and even so it does sweeping flange and lush chorus equally well.

What you get instead is Rate, for speed, from slow sweeps to a fast warble. Color, for how hard the effect bites. And Range, which reaches lower without moving the top, so the treble keeps a shimmer. Then there’s the Filter Matrix switch, which stops the sweep dead and freezes it mid-swoosh, leaving a metallic ring you can tune with Range.

The original ran on two 9-volt batteries. A Deluxe version followed in 1978.

Andy Summers had leaned on an MXR Phase 90 for the first Police album. For the second, Reggatta de Blanc, he used the Electric Mistress all over it, and kept using it on Zenyatta Mondatta.

I would use it on songs like ‘Walking on the Moon’ and ‘Message in a Bottle’. It became a sort of characteristic of my guitar sound.

Put on “Message in a Bottle.” That shimmer on the riff is what plenty of people take for a chorus pedal or a Roland Jazz Chorus amp. It’s the Mistress, set nearer chorus than flange. Then put on “Bring On the Night” for the other end of the dial: slow sweeps.

“Walking on the Moon” is harder to pin down. Summers names it, and the pedal now carries its name. But Chris Gray, an engineer at the studio, remembers a studio rack processor: “When those guitar chords come in on Walking On The Moon, that is purely the sound of that Scamp rack.” And Summers himself once said that “Walking on the Moon” was “all BOSS pedal stuff.” It depends who you ask, and on what day.

David Gilmour had an original Mistress too, and used it mostly for slow, sweeping flange on his solo records and Pink Floyd’s in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Fans keep long lists of which songs. Nobody who was in the room has signed off on them, so they stay lists. What’s certain is that it lasted: on Pink Floyd’s 1994 tour, his tech had a Mistress built into a rack, next to two Boss chorus pedals and a Univibe.

Alex Lifeson put one on “The Spirit of Radio” and the solo in “Red Barchetta.”

The company had a rougher ride than the pedal. Electro-Harmonix filed for bankruptcy in 1984. Mike Matthews brought its classics back as Russian-made Sovtek pedals in 1992, and EHX was making pedals in New York again by 2000. In 2015 the Deluxe shrank into a smaller box with a power jack and an LED.

In 2023, Electro-Harmonix put Andy Summers’s name on a renamed Deluxe Mistress, the Walking On The Moon. It was his first signature pedal. He was 80.

Mike Matthews was back in the story too. He and Summers talked the pedal through over breakfast at a posh hotel in New York. Summers made sure it wasn’t “a straight silver-topped black pedal” that “could have been anybody’s.” He got the song’s name on it, and his own.

Then, in a video interview about the new pedal, the word “flanger” came up.

What do they call it, a flanger? Who calls it a flanger? I would have called it a chorus.

Cockerell built it and Matthews named it. Forty-seven years on, the man whose name is on the front still calls it something else, and on Reggatta de Blanc it was both.