Flanger

MXR started as a repair shop in Rochester, New York, opened in 1971 by Keith Barr and Terry Sherwood. The Phase 90 went into serious production in late 1973, and more pedals followed: the Dyna Comp, the Distortion+, the Phase 100.

As the company grew, Barr brought in two technicians from the old repair shop, Tony Gambacurta and Richard Neatour. Both played an instrumental role in developing the Flanger, which came out in late 1976 with an Analog Delay, an Envelope Filter, and two graphic EQs. All of them wore a brand-new block logo, so there is no such thing as a script-logo Flanger.

It arrived in a scramble. New bucket-brigade chips, which could pass a signal along a chain of tiny capacitors and delay it a few thousandths of a second, had just turned up in 1974 and 1975. The first flangers you could buy were studio rack units, MXR’s own Auto Flanger among them. Then came the pedals. In late 1976 the same guitar magazine ran ads for the MXR Flanger, the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress and the Tycobrahe Pedalflanger side by side. Who got there first depends who you ask.

Here’s the trick. The pedal copies your signal, delays the copy by somewhere under about 10 milliseconds, and keeps sliding that delay longer and shorter. Mix the copy back in with the original and certain frequencies cancel out. As the delay moves, so do the notches, and the sound sweeps up and down like a plane going overhead.

There are four knobs. Manual sets where the sweep sits, Width sets how far it travels, Speed sets how fast, and Regeneration feeds the effect back into itself until it rings. Turn Width all the way down and the sweep stops, so you can park the effect in one spot with Manual.

Eddie found a spot and stayed there. “I set the three knobs on the left between 11 o’clock or 11:30, and the last knob on the right is all the way up,” he said. Sometimes he nudged the speed to match a song’s tempo. The Flanger went first, in front of the Phase 90, straight into the amp.

“I always use the same setting for everything,” he said, “from the intro to ‘And the Cradle Will Rock…’ to ‘Unchained,’ with the exception of the setting I used on the intro to ‘Outta Love Again’ and ‘Bullethead.’” So if you want to hear him move the knobs, that’s where to go: the opening of “Outta Love Again,” from Van Halen II.

Plenty of players had one in the ’70s and early ’80s. Joe Perry kept a Flanger with his MXR compressor, phaser and EQ. Randy Rhoads had one on his Blizzard of Ozz pedalboard, next to a Distortion+, a Cry Baby and an MXR chorus.

MXR stopped making the Flanger in the early ’80s and closed before the end of 1984. Dunlop bought the name in 1987 and brought the Flanger back in the mid-’90s, and it has been around since.

It still turns up. Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs had a vintage one on his board in 2014, in a rig with a ’56 reissue Strat. Kerry King of Slayer ran his wah straight into one in 2013, and from there into an MXR overdrive.

Fair Warning, 1981. The riff to “Unchained” is big and heavy, and now and then it whooshes. Here’s how that happened, in Eddie’s words:

Even the Flanger on ‘Unchained’ was totally by accident. The way it goes from the sweep up to the sweep down wasn’t planned. My normal setting just happened to fit the tempo of the song.

He kicked it in and out, heard the sweep rise and fall against the riff, and thought it sounded cool. He didn’t leave it on. “The riff just needed a little bit here and there.”

In 2007 MXR put out the EVH Flanger. Eddie and Bob Cedro of MXR went back and forth on prototypes for about nine months, comparing each one to his original ’70s Flanger. The new one got red and yellow lights and something the old one never had: a switch that calls up his “Unchained” settings.

Nine months of work, to put a switch on a sound he found by putzing around.