Pedals such as today’s featured behemoth are intimidating, plain and simple. However, once you sit down and chat with the Flanger Hoax from Electro-Harmonix for a little while, you’ll find that it’s a mellow, mild-mannered piece of gear, that just so happens to have a bunch of features and options, making it that much more lovable. A flanger, phaser and modulation monster all wrapped into one, this pedal has a bit of a learning curve, but the rewards are well worth the effort you put into learning the ins and outs.
Made up of two separate phaser sections and their delay lines, the Flanger Hoax will do everything from shimmering static and active phasing, to frequency adjustable flanging, to gorgeous delay-laden modulation, and anything and everything in between. BLEND mixes your wet and dry signals, and the mix of those two goes out through the Blende dOutput jack. The FEEDBACK knob sets the amount of signal fed back into the phase shift circuits, and has a toggle switch associated with it, too: WET feeds the wet signal back into the phaser; OFF turns off ALL feedback produced, and SWPT feeds the output of the Swept Phaser back into the phase Circuits.
The SWEPT PHASER CONTROL has three controls, which control the amount of modulation sweep, how the phaser reacts to the modulation waveform and different modes selecting the different phases of the modulation waveform. This section, when interacting with the Delay modulation, creates interesting effects when in or out of phase with the Delay. Up next, the MODULATOR section uses a RATE knob to set the frequency of the sine wave Modulator, as well as the DELAY mode that selects between different phase shift combinations for the modulating waveform that sweeps both the FIXED and SWEPT phaser delay lines.
On that note, the FIXED and SWEPT phaser sections are the two independent phase shifter circuits found in the Flanger Hoax: FIXED is set at 240o, while the SWEPT section varies between 240o to 990o. There’s a toggle switch for each of these sections, too, enabling you to bypass or enable them both independently, for multiple combinations and sonic experiments. There’s an INVERT toggle switch as well, which inverts the output of the FIXED phaser block after its delay line circuitry, and adds in another 180o more phase shift to the FIXED Phaser output.
Alrighty, then – confused yet? Some of you probably won’t be, but most of us definitely are. It’s ok, though, as you can sit down with this thing for an hour and figure out the basics, then take as much time as you need to dial in the specifics. The demo video right here is an attempt to show all the Flanger Hoax can do without being boring, as there are tons and tons of possibilities here to explore, so we hope you dig it. Electro-Harmonix once again sets the bar HIGH for complex and innovative effects, with this bad boy leading the way in modern flanging and phasing technology.
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