A LITTLE HISTORY

[FIX]

I was able to buy back my original FIX Flanger/Doubler that I built for the Bayou Nightclub in Washington DC around 1976, where I was the house sound guy. It used a delay card and noise reduction card designed by the one and only JOHN ROBERTS... JohnRoberts
The FIX Flanger Doubler are now plugins distributed by Softube. Fix Flanger and Doubler

This unit was wired to INSERT switches that I put into an Altec 1220 console, X2 joined together to have a massive 20 channels... We called it the Millennium Falcon. I put in insert switched for the Flanger and Doubler, and then selectable frequency points. Bands like The Ramones used that thing when they played there...

 

[JohnRoberts]

seems like just 4+ decades ago..... That was early days. The NR was a 2:1 compandor using a CA3080 OTA for the gain control element. In my later delay designs I used NE570/NE572 compandor ICs.
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Roger Fisher one of the guitar players in the band Heart used my kit flanger on Barracuda...
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Around the same time I designed consumer delay lines for Bozak, and a professional studio delay line/flanger for Loft (Loft 440 and 450). I can't begin to list number of music tracks the Loft was used on.

JR

 

[FIX]

I added a servo bounce circuit to the flanger, and pushed the delay limits for the flanger as much as I could to get it as close to zero as possible. I also came up with a trick to get the doubler to double between 3 and 15 m/sec with no flanging tone. Thats the trick that is now in the Softube version of it. They actually had to model the delay line to make it work. That part of the doubler is the only one currently out that can to that. You can use it on a guitar with no pick double, and even on a snare to make it fatter...

Using the compandor was the thing that gave your cards the depth that no one else had. Especially in a club. These two units were legendary in DC, and everyone learned Life in the Fast Lane, just to use the flanger...

 

[JohnRoberts]

To get the flanger delay even closer to zero you could use a shorter BBD, or use two and vary a delay vs a short fixed delay. That is noisy but give a closer mimic of the classic "reel flanging" done by dragging a hand on the outer edge of a tape reel to slow it down then let it catch back up. Of course generating delays using digital technology provides unlimited capabilities.

Doubling between 3mSec and 15 mSec is kind of short for the typical ADT effect, but if you want to sound different you need to be different.

JR

PS: With the LOFT 450 delay line/flanger we even did extra tricks like where you could slave a second one to the first with a flipped polarity control voltage. That way when the first was pitch shifting up, the second one was pitch shifting down a like amount, combining the two outputs gave three voices. At least one other effects maker copied that effect inside a single chassis.

 

[sahib]

Congratulations. A historical piece of equipment.

 

[FIX]

I basically cranked the clock as fast as it could go until it crashed. I had an eprom made that had a curved bottom and a slight log shape to the peak to make it feel more like a tape machine.

the doubler, I still keep the secret secret, as the ADT was historical because it was the first, but I’ve made records where the doubled voice was so close that it almost phase cancelled, so I figured out a way to make it shorter with no flange tone.
This was modeled really well in the plugin. You can put it at 3m/sec and make a nylon string guitar rotate with no double pick sound, and used on a snare, it’s like a widener….

 

[JohnRoberts]

I basically cranked the clock as fast as it could go until it crashed. I had an eprom made that had a curved bottom and a slight log shape to the peak to make it feel more like a tape machine.

Running BBDs up to very high clock frequency can also cause DC bias shift so at the short delay end of a sweep the signal can get some extra distortion, for better or worse. BBDs were not all the same. The Panasonic/Matshusita lines were similar to the Phillips BBDs they licensed the technology from. Reticon parts were different yet again. The modern Chinese stuff looks like its copied (or licensed) from Matshushita (who licensed it from Phillips).

You can put it at 3m/sec and make a nylon string guitar rotate with no double pick sound, and used on a snare, it’s like a widener….

3 mSec is clearly within the Haas precedence region where multiple sounds appear fused together as single events. Very percussive sounds like string picks can be perceived as discrete repeats with delays as short as 10-15 mSec (this is for similar loudness sounds). Less percussive sounds fuse together over longer delays (up to tens of mSec). This phenomenon was used to suppress localization for rear speaker surround sound systems.

JR

[TMI] There is an evolutionary basis for Haas precedence effect. Our brain fuses early sound reflections into the first arrival so we can better localize where sounds are coming from in a reverberant space. Probably helped our caveman ancestors survive. [/TMI]

 

[FIX]

Yea the short flanger delay had a lot of noise and distortion, but only for that point, and it really did sound like it crossed over the top…

with the doubler, it had an envelope mixed with the triangle wave and of course my secret secret flange cancellation circuit that made short doubling seem real.