How do I "flange" with an AG440?

[amphony]

I want to perform the old school technique of flanging. I have a prerecorded mix (on disc) that I was going to send to my Ampex AG440. What next?

 

[jpmorris]

I want to perform the old school technique of flanging. I have a prerecorded mix (on disc) that I was going to send to my Ampex AG440. What next?

You'll need two machines. If you've only got one, you're going to have a really poor time - you'll have to try and play the synchronise-two-recordings game which is really, really hard. The easier way is to treat both machines as tape delays. So if you have a digital delay of some kind, you could use that as the other machine at a pinch.

Basically, you feed the same signal to two machines. Take the feed off the the repro head, which gives a roughtly 1/15th of a second delay (on the Revox, don't know about the head spacing on the 440) on both units.

Now wire them up to the mixer, and set them so you're hearing the direct input from the machine to begin with. Then match the levels and optionally invert the signal so that they both cancel each other out. I couldn't get perfect cancellation, but I didn't actually need it for the effect to work.

Once they're doing phase cancellation on the mixer, switch them both to take the delayed signal. Leave one of them alone. On the other unit, use the varispeed knob to adjust the tape speed slightly, and you should be able to bring it in and out of phase cancellation by varying the speed of one of the units (the real one, if you're using a digital delay for the other).

This was what I got:

**EDIT**
You can use different models, but it gets harder as the inter-head gap is usually different. I did mine with a Tascam 32 and a Revox B77, and I had to have the Tascam varispeeded down to minimum to get them to match with the Revox at 15ips. You could probably just get any old 15ips machine as the fixed unit.

 

[littlesongs]

if you have a friend who is a deejay, you could probably borrow a pair of variable speed cd players... toss in your mix... take line levels out and blend the two signals... mix and adjust the pitch on one of the discs until the delay is in the perfect zone to your ear... once you like it, roll tape... it will more accurate than a second deck, less noisy, cheaper and kinder to the transport... an even more low-fi way would be to put the mix on a cassettes and use a standard machine and an old marantz pmd series recorder with variable speed for the effect... i am guessing that you want something more like the small faces than say, monster magnet, but in either case, i completely agree that an artificial delay should be a last resort... that ampex is a cool deck...