Hartman Analog Flanger

A little bit about the Flanger. It started out as a straight-up clone of the original green (non-deluxe) Electric Mistress. A client of mine, Steve Ouimette, was preparing a re-record of Rush’s Spirit of the Radio for Guitar Hero V and asked me if I’d replicate the circuit for him to do the guitar parts. Here is a clip of the re-recorded track.

I had no intention of creating a production flanger--it’s never been one of my favorite effects--but this one surprised me in a good way. So as Steve set about recording with the unit, I secured parts for more, not many, as there aren’t too many good Reticon BBD (“bucket brigade”) delay chips left floating around, but a few. I figured demand would be mild at best--it’s hard to source parts and hand-build a 40-year old design for a going price much better than that of a used original.

Flash-forward 2 years. I was wrong. In the course of designing the production unit we improved the noise floor and eliminated the volume drop--both shortcomings of the original. The result is not just a pedal with the tone we sought to recreate, but one of greater utility. Interest spread. The rest is a blur. In short, by the end of March 2009, we exhausted our supply of chip-stock and I had to suspend production.

The Reticons were unique—there is no drop-in replacement--and the only real contenders, the Panasonic BBD of the same period and architecture, were too picky to “read” the clock-signal from the Mistress’ timing circuitry. Also, they were not rated to be run at the speeds required to achieve the super-short delays of the Reticon—the feature that let the Mistress’ sweep come so close to the “through-zero” vanishing point.

It took me most of the summer of 2009 to make the design changes to run the flanger using the Panasonic chips. Happily, design changes were confined to the clock circuitry.  It was not necessary to change the value of components in audio signal path, so we could preserve the Mistress' intrinsic timbre/eq: frequency response. In terms of overall tone and flanging behavior it is a successful substitution. The Panasonics run quite cool even when overclocked--good news there. Better yet, however, they boast about 3db lower noise than the Reticons.

Now that I’m finished I wish I had done this 2 years ago. If there is one thing I love in a flanger it is transparency. After that: the ability to sweep at super-slow, glacial speeds. This flanger excels at both, and when you wanna get messy, it can deliver those raunchy jet-engine style “Cradle Will Rock” sweeps easily with a tweak of the clock trim inside.

I am very happy they are back.