Axe-Fx III Flanger?

@Admin M@ Thank you very much for these blocks Matt ! I've been trying for so long to get the Police E Mistress sound, sometimes getting close but never totally pleased with the result. I would never have thought to start from the digital mono effect type, and even less to get a stereo effect with a phase inversion... Brilliant !
 
Does anyone know what all the Axe FX III effects are based on? I know someone wrote how one effect is based on the Korg sdd3000. Just curious?
 
I have an original ADA Flanger that I always loved, and when I first got an Axe FXII years ago one of the first things I did was try and dial in the flanger to duplicate the ADA Flanger. I went back and forth with an A/B box and dialed it in. It took a while because I was new to the Axe FX, but I was able to get very very close. I tried out the factory settings of the different Flangers in the Axe FXIII and they sounded very good to me.
I had an A/DA Flanger many years ago and it was my all time favorite pedal. I have not heard any flanger pedal since that can duplicate the way that pedal sounded. Would you mind sharing settings on the flange block to reproduce the A/DA sound? Thanks.
 
Side note: the most intense effect any flanger can achieve occurs at 50% mix. Anything beyond that, and the effect is reduced.

I think "intensity" is actually quite interactive with other settings.
Compare for example, feedback 100, mix 100 to Feedback 0, mix 50 (set time to 1.0 ms).
 
IMO, the flanger, along with many other effects in the Axe, are super-high quality, pristine, and the most controllable you will find any where.

However....

They don't come across to me as accurate models of specific fx units (with a couple of exceptions). For me, the phasers and flangers sound great and are controllable enough to create a reasonable facsimile of most specific units, but often cannot be indistinguishable from them.

Of course, something like the Electric Mistress is a major problem, since EH used whatever components were available at the time. According to interviews with Mike Matthews, the components changed constantly due to the erratic availability of whatever was cheapest or was simply laying around the shop at the time.

I love the fx in the Axe, and would never complain about them. But some of the UAD plugins of specific fx units I've tried produce a more "authentic" result, both in sound and in behavior as you manipulate controls in real time. Of course, they are rarely as flexible as the same fx in the Axe, and flexibility is far more important to me in most circumstances.
 
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I think I would agree in part, although I mostly blame myself for being unable to replicate really specific tones due to my own failings in understanding what created the original tone in the first place. Being able to dial in the nuanced difference between individual units is a layer of complexity I hadn't considered. I had a decent reproduction of the Alex Lifeson "The Spirit of Radio" intro with the AxeFx II (currently gathering dust in a closet) but can't get as close with the III yet. Yet being the operative word. I'm fairly confident it's in there, I just need to tweak some more. With that tone (as well as many classic tones we chase), there are so many variables and unknowns in regards to how the final sound on the recording was achieved that I think we end up chasing our tails some of the time.
 
I think I would agree in part, although I mostly blame myself for being unable to replicate really specific tones due to my own failings in understanding what created the original tone in the first place. Being able to dial in the nuanced difference between individual units is a layer of complexity I hadn't considered. I had a decent reproduction of the Alex Lifeson "The Spirit of Radio" intro with the AxeFx II (currently gathering dust in a closet) but can't get as close with the III yet. Yet being the operative word. I'm fairly confident it's in there, I just need to tweak some more. With that tone (as well as many classic tones we chase), there are so many variables and unknowns in regards to how the final sound on the recording was achieved that I think we end up chasing our tails some of the time.
No flanger I've ever heard sounds like TSOR (studio version), no matter how it is adjusted. The Electric Mistress and Loft sound nothing like it (which he supposedly used). Lifeson's live tone sounded nothing like the studio recording. To my ears, the effect sounds far more like a phase shifter, and I have achieved a far more accurate result using the Axe's Phaser block than I ever could with the Flanger.
 
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Many times you can obtain the actual pedals used and still not get the tone. The Axe effects aren’t based on specific models of course, they just give you a tool set that should be able to come close to the tone of most popular effects. However, even if a specific pedal was modeled it may not match a certain recording.

I went a bought an old EM 18v, beat to heck and still like $350, and while similar, it didn’t sound any closer to Gilmour’s EM/tone than my $45 Moorer ELady, or the FAS model.

So we can say that given settings are close but not exact, and that is true, but it’s not like a specific model emulation is going to 100% nail it either. The emulation might sound spot on to the reference pedal, but, short of getting say, Gilmour’s pedal and finding out the exact component values, results may vary.

Heck, I bet you could buy 5 EM’s and they all would sound unique. 70’s era EHX was like a grab bag of parts and you grabbed a handful, build a few pedals, then grabbed some part parts, again whatever was around or cheap at the time etc, and built some more.

No one was in charge of testing each for consistency when it went out the door like modern pedal companies did.

The most sweetest perfect pedal could be built with a magic combination of parts tolerance and then the next one would be awful. Total luck of the draw.
 
The Spirit of Radio is a flanger, for sure. But it's applied post, so there may be other things you're hearing. I also always believed that the varitone was used for that section. In the past I have dialed in what "educated listeners" thought were very good examples of this in live clinics.

PS: I always also thought that section was recorded with the ES with the Varitone engaged (Pos 4?).
 
There's definitely some sort of filter effect heard, maybe it's the varitone, that's as good a theory as I've heard. For awhile I thought it might be a cocked wah or similar. I've read mixed reports even from the man himself about whether it was the ES 355 for TSOR or one of his newer (at the time) modded strats with a hb in the bridge. I've also heard him say flanger much more often, but I've heard him say phaser as well, although I tend to agree it's more flangeresque to my ears. I'm sure it's possible to get close with a phaser given the appropriate signal chain. On the III, the flanger straight into a chorus block gets closer than anything so far, and I've been messing around with pre and post filter blocks but I'm not quite there yet. I agree that he's never replicated the recording sound live, it's usually not anywhere close.
 
I'm not saying I think it is a phaser, just that I always got a closer result with one. Here is a quick (and sloppy) example of the best I could get with both.



Personally, I think the phaser sounds far more like the mod effect on the record than any flanger I've ever tried or heard.
 
Great discussion. I think the Fractal tools give us a bigger palette applicable to more songs for less money than you would spend on a whole whack of pedals/amps that maybe wouldn’t get us any closer.

The sometimes once in a blue moon I stumble upon my own tone by happenstance that when played in the cover sounds better or just more unique than the original and get complements on it. That is almost as cool as nailing the original tone.
 
For a phase-like flanger, try it 100% wet (or thereabouts) with negative feedback. Delay time is in the range of 0.2 ms IIRC.
 
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