Hey guys, in this video we’re going to talk about the flanger effect.
This is a sweeping effect that is often described as sounding like a jet plane.
We’ll discuss how it works, some of the settings you can control and then we’ll
go over a few examples of when and how we like to use it.
First, we’re going to talk about a flanger makes its very distinctive sound.
Flangers work by playing a slightly delayed signal soon after the original signal.
This causes constructive and destructive interference of the sound wave, which leads to some frequencies
being increased while others are decreased.
By varying the time of the delay, the flanger will sweep across the frequency spectrum in
a repeating cycle.
So to begin with we’ll talk about the settings for the flanger.
The settings we’re going to talk about are initial delay, final delay, stereo phasing,
feedback, and rate.
As we just said, the flanger effect works by varying the delay time of the duplicated
track.
These two controls let you choose the upper and lower limits of this cycle.
Setting the initial delay time controls how far in the cycle you will start and the final
delay determines how far it will go.
Keep in mind that since it is a cycle it can only go so far.
Setting the final delay too long will cause it to loop back and go through the cycle more
than once, which will make it appear as if the modulation rate is increasing.
The
flanger effect we are using also has the ability to spread out in stereo.
This is similar to the width in some other effects.
If we turn this up to 100, we can hear the sound spread out, but it’s not as if it
were moving from side to side.
The feedback control adjusts how pronounced our
sweeping sound is.
At a low setting, the effect is not too noticeable.
At 100%, it becomes very excessive and will make a mess of your sound.
I wouldn’t recommend using this past 90%.
As we said earlier, the flanger effect cycles from the initial to the final delay time.
The speed at which this cycle happens is known as the modulation rate.
You’ll want to keep this fairly low to create a good sweeping sound, otherwise it happens
too quickly and creates a trashy sound.
To get a good pronounced flanging effect, I generally keep the modulation rate below
1 Hz, but it can go up to 10 before I start experiencing issues.
The
final control adjusts the combination between the original and modified signal.
It increases the amount of flanging as it is turned up.
Thanks for watching this video on using flanging effects.
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Audacity and different audio effects.
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