Steve Reich had two reel to reels playing the same loop with a microphone swinging about both of them. Eventually both reel to reels went out of sync with each other. The result was amazing
It really is a delight :) great to see you getting into it ! A couple of cool things to maybe add. 1) flip the phase on one side and really work to get the signals as close to zero (fully nulled) as possible. The outputs and inputs are rarely perfectly calibrated so this allows you to use the desk to match gain first. Also leaving one with flipped phase gives a throaty sound. Nice alternative. 2) a good trick for those with only one tape machine (with varispeed) is to record the material on to tape. Rewind. Dump into the computer. Rewind for 2nd pass and add slight varispeed on that pass . Then line up the recordings in the DAW. Nice thing about this is you can time the null for extra drama. On ride cymbals it’s particularly juicy. 3) I got into the idea of multi flange where you take a stereo signal and run it to the flange process for the left side then repeat for the right channel. If you’re subtle the stereo signal sounds absolutely lush. I’ve tried that on Binaural signals and other wide sources and it’s great. A fair bit of work but so fun of course. This is one of my special interests and not to promo on your channel but I did make a full sample pack of the chamberlin M1 that’s up on decent sampler shop with each key run into 2 nagras with the flange. Each key played 5 times each with different flange per key. Was a flange quest !
@ running at 30 IPS would help for the manual flange effect as the hand moves would have less of a dramatic effect. The slower the tape, the more you can violently throw it out.
One of the reasons why it will sound different from BBDs is because decent tape, running at high-enough speed, will have more bandwidth than the typical BBD, simply because all the lowpass filtering in many BBD-based circuits (to keep clock noise out as well as for anti-aliasing) will restrict the bandwidth of the wet signal.
another reason is that it's possible for the tape to be both ahead and behind of the signal being modulated whereas with BBDs, they are always behind of the signal by definition.
I enjoyed Alex's video, but thought it was pretty slack he didn't demonstrate actual physical tape flanging too. Only joking. I would have done this myself but I only have one tape machine 😂 One idea I haven't tried yet is to dump a part from computer to tape, wobble it a bit, then record it back in and sync it up with the original digital copy. You'd have less control, but should get a similar sound.
There's still something special about old school techniques. Tape flanging, tape delay, spring reverb, Leslie cabinets. I tried this decades ago using two mismatched cassette decks and a really cheap portable cassette player to record it on. No adjustment of tape speed. The natural mismatch of replay speed did all the work. Sounded brilliant, particularly at the through zero point.
Very cool. And I love that "YEAH!" moment ... Hard to explain, but it's that emotional high where there's like a sudden realization that everything clicks into place. Great feeling. Needs to be a word for that feeling. There's gotta be some long german word for it.
@@levvl11 chatgpt gave me those, and they're very close but not exactly. i think we get that same "YEAH!" moment while listening to music too, so it's not exactly discovering something. it's more like uncontrollable excitement.
I heard this in my teens in the 70s. I remember using a reel to reel tape deck and recording something suitable from an LP, then I would play them back together. With some trial and error and tapping the reel to make them both near to in sync, the two would slowly ‘pass each other’ over a few seconds - the effect was truly amazing to hear.
Also wanted to say this inspired me to jump onto my ZOIA to see if I could make anything similar. I don't know if I did or not, really, but I came up with a patch I absolutely love, which uses the audio signal delay to push back one channel by just some dozen or two milliseconds, and then I use an LFO to shift that delay time slowly, and it produces a really cool tape effect - even if it ends up not being the same thing as this flanging at all. Added in some phasor, options to over compress it, and lovely ghost reverb, and you have a really cool sound. Thanks for the inspiration! It made me come up with an effect I don't think I'd have thought about on my own, at all - but I can see it being one I use fairly frequently!
Some really beautiful sounds there! The live modulated machines obviously won't let the synch go out as wildly, but both have their own merits. Having a pair of Nagras is a headstart, very sweet.
Check out the 1959 US hit single "The Big Hurt" by Miss Toni Fisher, a case of accidental flanging/phasing as the producer tried playing 2 copies of the master simultaneously to fatten up the sound but what happened was the first (?) instance of flanging on a record. Wonderful video!!!!
You’re a stallion! I just went to my local music store yesterday and put a reel to reel on layaway. Thanks for being part of the inspiration for buying one!
I thought I was already subscribe to this magnificent channel of hardware analog experimentation and creation, that makes wonderful sounds and soundscapes. Not forgetting the musical knowledge and talent. I love it, so subscribed, like I should have done years ago. Respect, peace and love. Keep doing your thing, it's fantastic!
I love the"witch house"/Project records like bit of music youre applying the flanger to at 1130 or so, and the flanged accordion drone is absolutely amazing !
It came from George Martin and Peter Sellers recording the Songs for Swingin Sellers LP in 1959, they had to come up with a pseudonym for singer Matt Monro doing a Sinatra impression on the album so Sellers came up with Fred Flange, possibly after hearing Martin talk about the tape flanges...likely Lennon heard Martin recollect this and applied it to the practice....Lots of creativity going on there.
the best example of this is "Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces. I use to do this many years ago with an old Grundig Tape recorder. I think that I recorded a record and then played them back together . Because it was recorded the speed of the tape and the record should be the same but obviously with old tech there would be a very, very slight shift in speeds between the two machines. The effect would last for a short time but it was magnificent.
Damn that tape sounds dope - thick and lush! Cool demo. We used to do this with two records on two turntables. It sounds amazing in the club. When I was dj-ing I would always want two copies of my favorite tracks to do these delay tricks. Being able to do it with tape decks is cool AF. I really love how it sounds with the piano.
Doooood! I have wanted to try this for ages! I remember when Smashing Pumpkins released Cherub Rock (93), I read in a guitar magazine this is how they did the guitar solo. 2 mono decks, solo was recorded, then they basically just messed with the tapes when recording it to the master. Still one of the clearest examples I know of to demonstrate what true tape flanging sounds like. I have a couple flanger pedals, along with a few multi-effect devices, but they don’t really sound like using tapes. Oh, incidentally- running a gentle LFO on one motor basically just does what a flanger pedal does.
Elegant video sir . I love 101 Strings Astro Sounds from beyond the year 2000 flanging of the Strings - it gets completely bonkers ! . It takes Jerry Cole and the Spacemen to another level.
It's one of those 'how did they do it' sounds (first appearing in the late 60's) that is un-matched by digital simulations. The temporal shift of phase is the important part.. pre and post relative to the reference. I tried it out when I got my Fostex X-15 4-track, by recording the same source material twice whilst using slight varispeed. Deep phasing resulted, very pleased! :)
I just sensed the screams of some audiophiles as your jack got caught and gently graced the face of the nagra 😂 you could probably drop one of these down some stairs and it'll still function!
As a teenager, I used a Panasonic cassette player going into the input of a reel-to-reel Grundig Aux input. I used my finger to delay the Grundig reels, I'm not in love by 10 cc flanges really well I. I also used a vinyl against its' own recording onto a cassette using an old National Panasonic Music Centre where you could depress the record and cassette selector to have both sound sources playing simultaneously. I delayed the vinyl turn table to produce the effect. Silly love songs by Wings flanges well
I remember the first time i got in touch with phasing or flanging. I had a guitar-course based in the rooms of our church in the neighbourhood. Of course we played christiasn music (when somebody else listened), but our "coach" teached us the "good" things. And he had a phaser as a guitar-effect. I asked how it worked, and he told me. I was not able to pay for such a thing, but my father had an old tube-tapemachine "TK-47" from Telefunken, but this was not used for the Phasing/Flanging, i only had one machine. He had a stereo-microphone that could be "broken" into two separate microphones. I had a speaker playing some music, and the microphones were connected together, as i remember i connected them in line, not parallel. Then i played the music, the first mike was in front of the speaker, the second moved by hand, and the flanging-effect was good to hear. I never used this after that, cause the TK-47 was much mor fun, whit its "Hinterbandkontrolle", Echo-capabilities, two-track-things and multiple-stereo-track-recording by recording the mix again and again, loosing more and more quality...
I discovered this method of flanging in early 1992 by accident with a dual deck boom box with a continuous play feature that allowed both decks to play any time or simultaneously. the flange depended on the tape speed if the same song was in the beginning middle or end of the tape. there was no pitch mod so I would un pause one tape at a certain part of the song to sync and hear the phasing.
Nagras.. the Unobtainium of my youth together with Revox A77 but I still have a Grundig TK245 with tubes and a SABA SH 600 from a former mobile radio station (Ü-Wagen in German) I cut and glued tapes in around 1983, made a radio play as a hobby :) and repaired that shit as good as I could..
@HAINBACH I experimented with a pair of AKAI RTR machines rescued from my dads old studio gear. Both machines were modified for CV speed control. You will find some wonderful effects when You feed the mono audio outputs from both machines into a stereo delay with a simple opamp buffer stage in each path between the RTRs and the delay inputs. With one opamp setup to Invert the signal and one non inverting. Mix and pan the stereo signal output from the delay. I also had much fun using a pair of classic KORG BBD signal delay units, one of each channel with the outputs mixed, the inverted and non inverted signals interact in interesting ways, using a 3 channel oscilloscope to monitor the inverted and non inverted signals before the delay stage and the mixed output was very interesting. Have fun and Keep On Modulatin'
@HAINBACH Really amazing stuff, thank you for sharing and the history lesson I found very interesting regarding flanging. Let me ask you, do you think you’ll make an EP of sorts using this method? Really enjoyed your music, much respect.
Use a sampler, assign a recorded audio stem to two channels, give them both the same key map and when triggering they will play perfectly in time. Modulation can be achieved with mod wheel to push or pull one channel, as could a slow LFO or sample start offsets
Fun idea to use the tension wheels, especially since you could get a bouncy wobble I hadn't heard before as an effect. And automatic LFO controlled flagging with actual reel-to-reels is definitely unique. 😀
I modded a pair of Boss BF-1 flangers to produce ONLY delayed signal (nothing special; I just lifted the resistor on each that normally mixes in dry with wet). But since that particular model of flanger can achieve very short fixed delays, I could use one as my "clean" signal that the modulated delay could now move "ahead of" in time, and pass through the zero point on the way there. This, of course, requires that I split the signal in order to feed each flanger the same thing, and then mix them back together again. What's also interesting is that if I let BOTH of them modulate their delay time independently, the through-zero point moves around in unpredictable fashion. I posted a demo of this as a TH-cam, findable by the name "Dual flanger thru-zero". Just note that, for some reason - likely the shared power supply - I have to keep turning the flanger pedals off and on. But you still get plenty of instances of that delicious thru-zero phenomenon.
Right around 2 milliseconds? I had an old DOD that was the first digital unit I ever used. It had an ok chorus range just above that section I don't remember how long the chorus wet was delayed though. 30-ish?
Don’t be ashamed - George Martin tells a very differed story, that flanging was a new and entirely electronic effect, and John Lennon being given to inventing improbable, florid names for things came up with a long winded name for it which included the words “multi-flanged”. This was then abbreviated to “flanging”. Years later, Martin asked a young recording engineer if he knew how flanging got its name, and was told the story about two tapes used this way. It was news to him.
Cool to finally know why it is called flanging. I see you already had to remove a knob from your control box for finger space. A redesign to accommodate much larger knobs would make it much more finely adjustable.
I'm surprised someone like you had never done tape flanging before. It's the classic Beatles "ADT" effect. You can even do it with only one tape machine, using a DAW (you need at least two ouputs). There weren't much info on the web 20 years ago about tape flanging, but I came with my own technique : Find the delay time between your record and playback heads (I'll let you work on this one). Record a track in your DAW. and create a digital copy of your track delayed with the record/playback head time value. Send the original track to the tape machine, but don't monitor this track. You need to listen both to the delayed track from you DAW and to the playback head of the tape machine, mixed together. Now you can play with the machine speed and record the result live into your DAW. With a varyspeed knob, you can find your sweet spot, adjusting the delay. It works better with a good quality tape machine, running at faster speeds, so the recorded signal is very similar to the original one.
What a fun experiment! I always wish I had the money and space to play around with tape, but for now I'll enjoy it through your laboratory experiments 😉 what delightful sounds! And I normally don't particularly care for flanger FXs.
I am more used to the way of recording a section of your mix onto a mono (or 2 track) machine and then fly that into a spare track on your multitrack (could be a DAW these days). As you very well demonstrated this takes a lot of practice to get it right and I think after even about a week I still didn't manage to get it just right to get the most extreme bit of flanging on the bar I wanted.
If you have a pair of Stellavox SP7 or SP8, the ASV speed controller allows continuously variable speed control. A variable capacitor can be used in place of the ASV as they are somewhat rare. Not certain of what range of capacitance is required.
Recordings of flanging sound cool but if you've never experience "live" flanging I highly recommend trying it out. It's a wonderful, visceral sonic experience and never quite the same twice.
1:13 …and I went: “Whaaa? I’ve done it…!” _(Cringely commenting early in the video. I used two Studer A-80 ¼” machines, “borrowing” the varispeed oscillator output from the 24-track. The wonder of all the A-80s being engineered variants of one design… and of being a house engineer at 22 in 1988…)_ 🙈🎶🤓
I’m so very glad to see this video! I’m an OLD geezer who experimented with this technique back in the 1970’s doing exactly what you’re doing. MANY people nowadays have no idea how this done, somehow thinking it was done with only one tape deck. Your video will hopefully educate a lot if people. By the way, the letter A in the word “flange” is a short “a”, so it’s pronounced like “a” in “cat”.
A middle-aged guy sitting in a room full of weird equipment screaming ''yeah'' after he turns on a switch is the synth-iest thing you'll see on youtube 😆 Great video Hainbach, pleasure to watch!
Fabulous - I noticed your piano flange experiment sounded a lot like the intro treated piano of Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes", and was that a little "Trans Europe Express" there?. Love the manual distortion, so interesting, I figured "flanging" had it's roots in some analog process - thanks for surfacing it's origins.
![ปฏิเสธไม่ไหว (Crush on you) - LIPTA feat. No One Else [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NBw1jF342vw/mqdefault.jpg)
That was a really fun one to make, but now I am addicted to the sound! Check out my Patreon for samples & music: patreon.com/hainbach
Steve Reich had two reel to reels playing the same loop with a microphone swinging about both of them. Eventually both reel to reels went out of sync with each other. The result was amazing
It really is a delight :) great to see you getting into it ! A couple of cool things to maybe add. 1) flip the phase on one side and really work to get the signals as close to zero (fully nulled) as possible. The outputs and inputs are rarely perfectly calibrated so this allows you to use the desk to match gain first. Also leaving one with flipped phase gives a throaty sound. Nice alternative. 2) a good trick for those with only one tape machine (with varispeed) is to record the material on to tape. Rewind. Dump into the computer. Rewind for 2nd pass and add slight varispeed on that pass . Then line up the recordings in the DAW. Nice thing about this is you can time the null for extra drama. On ride cymbals it’s particularly juicy. 3) I got into the idea of multi flange where you take a stereo signal and run it to the flange process for the left side then repeat for the right channel. If you’re subtle the stereo signal sounds absolutely lush. I’ve tried that on
Binaural signals and other wide sources and it’s great. A fair bit of work but so fun of course. This is one of my special interests and not to promo on your channel but I did make a full sample pack of the chamberlin M1 that’s up on decent sampler shop with each key run into 2 nagras with the flange. Each key played 5 times each with different flange per key. Was a flange quest !
Cool tips, gotta try the phase inversion now!
Im thinking back in the day they were using large diameter reels this would result in finer speed control with your thumb on the flange
@ running at 30
IPS would help for the manual flange effect as the hand moves would have less of a dramatic effect. The slower the tape, the more you can violently throw it out.
This is so outrageously cool. Sounds amazing, somewhat different to BBD chips as you were saying.
Not surprised that you're here since you made a video on the Eventide Flanger a few days ago
One of the reasons why it will sound different from BBDs is because decent tape, running at high-enough speed, will have more bandwidth than the typical BBD, simply because all the lowpass filtering in many BBD-based circuits (to keep clock noise out as well as for anti-aliasing) will restrict the bandwidth of the wet signal.
another reason is that it's possible for the tape to be both ahead and behind of the signal being modulated whereas with BBDs, they are always behind of the signal by definition.
Nice to see these two videos come together.
I enjoyed Alex's video, but thought it was pretty slack he didn't demonstrate actual physical tape flanging too.
Only joking. I would have done this myself but I only have one tape machine 😂
One idea I haven't tried yet is to dump a part from computer to tape, wobble it a bit, then record it back in and sync it up with the original digital copy. You'd have less control, but should get a similar sound.
There's still something special about old school techniques. Tape flanging, tape delay, spring reverb, Leslie cabinets. I tried this decades ago using two mismatched cassette decks and a really cheap portable cassette player to record it on. No adjustment of tape speed. The natural mismatch of replay speed did all the work. Sounded brilliant, particularly at the through zero point.
8:35 - that piano solo. Gorgeous, and such a mood!
Thank you Brice! Just played what fell into my head
Very cool. And I love that "YEAH!" moment ... Hard to explain, but it's that emotional high where there's like a sudden realization that everything clicks into place. Great feeling. Needs to be a word for that feeling. There's gotta be some long german word for it.
Tonbandverzauberung maybe 🤔
"Eureka-Moment" or "Aha-Moment" maybe? :)
@@Hainbachnow you have to make a short where you pronounce that 😂
_Aha-Erlebnis_
@@levvl11 chatgpt gave me those, and they're very close but not exactly.
i think we get that same "YEAH!" moment while listening to music too, so it's not exactly discovering something. it's more like uncontrollable excitement.
The harmona sounds awesome through that. Very soundtrack like!
Der Pullover Mann ist sympatisch und intelligent. Viel Spaß mit der Technik und alles Gute !
Dankeschön!
I heard this in my teens in the 70s. I remember using a reel to reel tape deck and recording something suitable from an LP, then I would play them back together. With some trial and error and tapping the reel to make them both near to in sync, the two would slowly ‘pass each other’ over a few seconds - the effect was truly amazing to hear.
Love these cross-pollination videos between these great channels.
How marvellous it sounds on saw waves (which is usually not my favourite waveform).
Yeah the collabs are one of my absolute favs, even if its a simple bouncing off as its here.
Sawtooth waves have all those harmonic frequencies going on. It's similar to why distorted guitar sounds so cool through a flanger or chorus pedal.
3:56 David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes! 😄
So simple yet so unforgettable.
0:19 Showing something as if it was on an oscilloscope is such an on-brand way to quote another video.
Also wanted to say this inspired me to jump onto my ZOIA to see if I could make anything similar. I don't know if I did or not, really, but I came up with a patch I absolutely love, which uses the audio signal delay to push back one channel by just some dozen or two milliseconds, and then I use an LFO to shift that delay time slowly, and it produces a really cool tape effect - even if it ends up not being the same thing as this flanging at all.
Added in some phasor, options to over compress it, and lovely ghost reverb, and you have a really cool sound.
Thanks for the inspiration! It made me come up with an effect I don't think I'd have thought about on my own, at all - but I can see it being one I use fairly frequently!
That is so beautiful and something I always hope for when I make a video. Thank you for sharing!
@@Hainbach likewise! Honestly, many of your experiments lead me to do my own experiments as well - this one turned out really usable!
Some really beautiful sounds there!
The live modulated machines obviously won't let the synch go out as wildly, but both have their own merits. Having a pair of Nagras is a headstart, very sweet.
So many correct uses of screwdrivers in this one! 🤩
Superb! 👏 Shared on Sonicstate today
Check out the 1959 US hit single "The Big Hurt" by Miss Toni Fisher, a case of accidental flanging/phasing as the producer tried playing 2 copies of the master simultaneously to fatten up the sound but what happened was the first (?) instance of flanging on a record. Wonderful video!!!!
You’re a stallion! I just went to my local music store yesterday and put a reel to reel on layaway. Thanks for being part of the inspiration for buying one!
I thought I was already subscribe to this magnificent channel of hardware analog experimentation and creation, that makes wonderful sounds and soundscapes. Not forgetting the musical knowledge and talent. I love it, so subscribed, like I should have done years ago. Respect, peace and love. Keep doing your thing, it's fantastic!
I'm so glad I found your channel!
Happy Hainbach!
💖🎧💖
That "yeaaah" at the very beginning was kind of adorable lol. Thanks for cheering me up on a day when I can definitely use it.
There’s something so organic about it, you just couldn’t do that digitally. Now do 4 for quadraphonic Flange!
Strymon Deco does it pretty convincingly
Awesome. This is the type of reaction video I want to see more of!
best channel on youtube, always a delight when you upload !
Sweet gear. Sweet tape stuff
I love the"witch house"/Project records like bit of music youre applying the flanger to at 1130 or so, and the flanged accordion drone is absolutely amazing !
5 minutes is heavenly
All of your experiments are great. This one is an absolute favourite!
Cool sounds, fantastic setup of all the gear you have also!
Your happiness is infectious! Thank you and very cool !
The effect was discovered by none other than Les Paul. John Lennon coined the term "flanging" while recording the Revolver album.
It came from George Martin and Peter Sellers recording the Songs for Swingin Sellers LP in 1959, they had to come up with a pseudonym for singer Matt Monro doing a Sinatra impression on the album so Sellers came up with Fred Flange, possibly after hearing Martin talk about the tape flanges...likely Lennon heard Martin recollect this and applied it to the practice....Lots of creativity going on there.
the best example of this is "Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces. I use to do this many years ago with an old Grundig Tape recorder. I think that I recorded a record and then played them back together . Because it was recorded the speed of the tape and the record should be the same but obviously with old tech there would be a very, very slight shift in speeds between the two machines. The effect would last for a short time but it was magnificent.
Damn that tape sounds dope - thick and lush! Cool demo. We used to do this with two records on two turntables. It sounds amazing in the club. When I was dj-ing I would always want two copies of my favorite tracks to do these delay tricks. Being able to do it with tape decks is cool AF. I really love how it sounds with the piano.
Doooood! I have wanted to try this for ages! I remember when Smashing Pumpkins released Cherub Rock (93), I read in a guitar magazine this is how they did the guitar solo. 2 mono decks, solo was recorded, then they basically just messed with the tapes when recording it to the master. Still one of the clearest examples I know of to demonstrate what true tape flanging sounds like. I have a couple flanger pedals, along with a few multi-effect devices, but they don’t really sound like using tapes. Oh, incidentally- running a gentle LFO on one motor basically just does what a flanger pedal does.
Surprised it sounds so good
Lovely sweater.
Elegant video sir . I love 101 Strings Astro Sounds from beyond the year 2000 flanging of the Strings - it gets completely bonkers ! . It takes Jerry Cole and the Spacemen to another level.
You absolute joy when you first flanged was beautiful.
Very cool! I love the sound and the fact that it changes every time to make it even more interesting.
8:26 OK THAT WAS GORGEOUS👏👏👏
amazing to watch as always, sir
Great video! My favorite example of flanging is all over the Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."
Very sublime sounds coming from the Harmona.
You always have the coolest, most unique & informative videos…bravo!
It's one of those 'how did they do it' sounds (first appearing in the late 60's) that is un-matched by digital simulations.
The temporal shift of phase is the important part.. pre and post relative to the reference.
I tried it out when I got my Fostex X-15 4-track, by recording the same source material twice whilst using slight varispeed.
Deep phasing resulted, very pleased! :)
I had to bust out the Bowie vinyl for “Ashes to Ashes” because that piano with flange is so amazing.
I really low how you, Alex and Sam are ping-pong'ing content!
love it !!!
What a marvelous effect. Sounds SO good. I wonder if this would be doable in an equally creative way using Ableton devices only.
That’s so awesome
I just sensed the screams of some audiophiles as your jack got caught and gently graced the face of the nagra 😂 you could probably drop one of these down some stairs and it'll still function!
Very sturdy indeed!
Aaahh!! So cool!
Fantastico!
This is cool, I used to do a similar thing with 2 copies of the same record and holding my finger on the edge of the platter.
The Small Faces - Itchycoo Park had some great flanging on that track.
As a teenager, I used a Panasonic cassette player going into the input of a reel-to-reel Grundig Aux input. I used my finger to delay the Grundig reels, I'm not in love by 10 cc flanges really well I. I also used a vinyl against its' own recording onto a cassette using an old National Panasonic Music Centre where you could depress the record and cassette selector to have both sound sources playing simultaneously. I delayed the vinyl turn table to produce the effect. Silly love songs by Wings flanges well
I remember the first time i got in touch with phasing or flanging. I had a guitar-course based in the rooms of our church in the neighbourhood. Of course we played christiasn music (when somebody else listened), but our "coach" teached us the "good" things. And he had a phaser as a guitar-effect. I asked how it worked, and he told me.
I was not able to pay for such a thing, but my father had an old tube-tapemachine "TK-47" from Telefunken, but this was not used for the Phasing/Flanging, i only had one machine.
He had a stereo-microphone that could be "broken" into two separate microphones. I had a speaker playing some music, and the microphones were connected together, as i remember i connected them in line, not parallel. Then i played the music, the first mike was in front of the speaker, the second moved by hand, and the flanging-effect was good to hear.
I never used this after that, cause the TK-47 was much mor fun, whit its "Hinterbandkontrolle", Echo-capabilities, two-track-things and multiple-stereo-track-recording by recording the mix again and again, loosing more and more quality...
The piano part arond 8:20 gave me chills down my spine...
I discovered this method of flanging in early 1992 by accident with a dual deck boom box with a continuous play feature that allowed both decks to play any time or simultaneously. the flange depended on the tape speed if the same song was in the beginning middle or end of the tape. there was no pitch mod so I would un pause one tape at a certain part of the song to sync and hear the phasing.
Nagras.. the Unobtainium of my youth together with Revox A77 but I still have a Grundig TK245 with tubes and a SABA SH 600 from a former mobile radio station (Ü-Wagen in German)
I cut and glued tapes in around 1983, made a radio play as a hobby :) and repaired that shit as good as I could..
@HAINBACH I experimented with a pair of AKAI RTR machines rescued from my dads old studio gear. Both machines were modified for CV speed control. You will find some wonderful effects when You feed the mono audio outputs from both machines into a stereo delay with a simple opamp buffer stage in each path between the RTRs and the delay inputs. With one opamp setup to Invert the signal and one non inverting. Mix and pan the stereo signal output from the delay. I also had much fun using a pair of classic KORG BBD signal delay units, one of each channel with the outputs mixed, the inverted and non inverted signals interact in interesting ways, using a 3 channel oscilloscope to monitor the inverted and non inverted signals before the delay stage and the mixed output was very interesting. Have fun and Keep On Modulatin'
Oh my this sounds like such a good time!
♪ ♫ Flangers in the ♫ niiiight!
@HAINBACH Really amazing stuff, thank you for sharing and the history lesson I found very interesting regarding flanging. Let me ask you, do you think you’ll make an EP of sorts using this method? Really enjoyed your music, much respect.
Use a sampler, assign a recorded audio stem to two channels, give them both the same key map and when triggering they will play perfectly in time. Modulation can be achieved with mod wheel to push or pull one channel, as could a slow LFO or sample start offsets
Fun idea to use the tension wheels, especially since you could get a bouncy wobble I hadn't heard before as an effect. And automatic LFO controlled flagging with actual reel-to-reels is definitely unique. 😀
Yeah the tension wheels had a mind of their own 😃
This is so cool, geiler Sche**ß!!🤩✌️
Your becoming a DJ (the old school type not the new one)
It really felt like that 😄
I guess one should call that TJ?
Very nice deep sound there when the other player gets on around (11:00) in the video.
Yeah that was my highlight too
I modded a pair of Boss BF-1 flangers to produce ONLY delayed signal (nothing special; I just lifted the resistor on each that normally mixes in dry with wet). But since that particular model of flanger can achieve very short fixed delays, I could use one as my "clean" signal that the modulated delay could now move "ahead of" in time, and pass through the zero point on the way there. This, of course, requires that I split the signal in order to feed each flanger the same thing, and then mix them back together again. What's also interesting is that if I let BOTH of them modulate their delay time independently, the through-zero point moves around in unpredictable fashion. I posted a demo of this as a TH-cam, findable by the name "Dual flanger thru-zero". Just note that, for some reason - likely the shared power supply - I have to keep turning the flanger pedals off and on. But you still get plenty of instances of that delicious thru-zero phenomenon.
Right around 2 milliseconds?
I had an old DOD that was the first digital unit I ever used. It had an ok chorus range just above that section I don't remember how long the chorus wet was delayed though. 30-ish?
Thats sooooo cool! :D
I like a nice bit of flange 😂
Feier ich extrem! 🔥mega!!
Never knew why they named that effect "flanging". Duh, thanks for clearing that up. Spent years with tape, I am ashamed.
Don’t be ashamed - George Martin tells a very differed story, that flanging was a new and entirely electronic effect, and John Lennon being given to inventing improbable, florid names for things came up with a long winded name for it which included the words “multi-flanged”. This was then abbreviated to “flanging”.
Years later, Martin asked a young recording engineer if he knew how flanging got its name, and was told the story about two tapes used this way. It was news to him.
Cool to finally know why it is called flanging. I see you already had to remove a knob from your control box for finger space. A redesign to accommodate much larger knobs would make it much more finely adjustable.
Ten Turn pot is the next try, else we have to change the circuitry so it works with any Nagra well.
I'm surprised someone like you had never done tape flanging before. It's the classic Beatles "ADT" effect. You can even do it with only one tape machine, using a DAW (you need at least two ouputs). There weren't much info on the web 20 years ago about tape flanging, but I came with my own technique :
Find the delay time between your record and playback heads (I'll let you work on this one). Record a track in your DAW. and create a digital copy of your track delayed with the record/playback head time value. Send the original track to the tape machine, but don't monitor this track. You need to listen both to the delayed track from you DAW and to the playback head of the tape machine, mixed together. Now you can play with the machine speed and record the result live into your DAW. With a varyspeed knob, you can find your sweet spot, adjusting the delay. It works better with a good quality tape machine, running at faster speeds, so the recorded signal is very similar to the original one.
What a fun experiment! I always wish I had the money and space to play around with tape, but for now I'll enjoy it through your laboratory experiments 😉 what delightful sounds! And I normally don't particularly care for flanger FXs.
Yeah flanger is my least favourite effect too, but done with tape it just sounds so different. Probably because it phases at the same time?
@@Hainbach I think it must be... just that hint of natural, analog warm chorus that glues it all together so well.
I am more used to the way of recording a section of your mix onto a mono (or 2 track) machine and then fly that into a spare track on your multitrack (could be a DAW these days). As you very well demonstrated this takes a lot of practice to get it right and I think after even about a week I still didn't manage to get it just right to get the most extreme bit of flanging on the bar I wanted.
If you have a pair of Stellavox SP7 or SP8, the ASV speed controller allows continuously variable speed control. A variable capacitor can be used in place of the ASV as they are somewhat rare. Not certain of what range of capacitance is required.
Good to know, thanks!
Recordings of flanging sound cool but if you've never experience "live" flanging I highly recommend trying it out. It's a wonderful, visceral sonic experience and never quite the same twice.
You can sort of do this in a digital realm with two turntables and a timecode system like serato or something, Love the Bowie piano!
5:26 so reminiscent of Coil's Loves Secret Domain
This is THE sound. The original technique always sounds the best
1:13 …and I went: “Whaaa? I’ve done it…!”
_(Cringely commenting early in the video. I used two Studer A-80 ¼” machines, “borrowing” the varispeed oscillator output from the 24-track. The wonder of all the A-80s being engineered variants of one design… and of being a house engineer at 22 in 1988…)_ 🙈🎶🤓
I’m so very glad to see this video! I’m an OLD geezer who experimented with this technique back in the 1970’s doing exactly what you’re doing. MANY people nowadays have no idea how this done, somehow thinking it was done with only one tape deck. Your video will hopefully educate a lot if people.
By the way, the letter A in the word “flange” is a short “a”, so it’s pronounced like “a” in “cat”.
A middle-aged guy sitting in a room full of weird equipment screaming ''yeah'' after he turns on a switch is the synth-iest thing you'll see on youtube 😆 Great video Hainbach, pleasure to watch!
Definitely heard the intro to Ashes to Ashes in there
fk im so jealous of this mans life 🤣. Love u Hainbach ❤
Love it? What is meant by “Through zero flanging”? From what I understand it was used on Jimi Hendrix’s Bold as Love album.
Were you flanging your voice at points during this video?
With two Nagras, is that the most exepensive flanger in the world? ;)
The drumloop on both reels - sounds soooo fat! :P
/ nice video! :)
CV in on the trex echorec is usefull, and so are the balanced in and outputs allowing phase inversion...
When i was a kid my favourite program was The Tomorrow People. I guess most people wouldnt know you were playing the theme🙂
Lovely to see with tape! Use an attenuvertor instead of just mixing - the eventide (alex) does that!
Coo! Yeah I tried feeding back in the video, but the delay between heads is too long - it becomes a flanged echo.
Did you try the inverter attenuator? (I commented before that bit of the video, sorry!)
My favourite use of flanger is in lost boys by death grips, its so goddamn cool
seems like this may work sortof with like vinyl or serato controllers with both desks playing the same thing.. or even virtual dj
Ich will so ein Tonbandgerät, die fand ich schon immer super geil...
Die 80er sind zurück!
Have you done ADT?
No but Same process, just with vocals.
The goat
Fabulous - I noticed your piano flange experiment sounded a lot like the intro treated piano of Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes", and was that a little "Trans Europe Express" there?. Love the manual distortion, so interesting, I figured "flanging" had it's roots in some analog process - thanks for surfacing it's origins.
Yeah that was Ashes to Ashes, as Alex explored that in his video.
@@Hainbach yeak, ok - not so dissimilar to the keyboard treatment of the piano in parts of Blade Runner also