What pedal is best for swirly, trippy sort of sounds

[Mark Hammer]

Just an addendum that, while the website refers those interested to the M5/9/13, none of those retains all the same modulation options that are available in the Liqui-Flange. They have a little more than your basic 3-knob flanger, but not as much as an actual Liqui-Flange.

[Steve A.]

Thanks for mentioning Leslie - yes the simulators all fall short. Though it's a thousand times bigger than a pedal, there's nothing like a real Leslie (147, 145, 122) for guitar. LUV that sound!

Yes and no... you can never get the 3D sound of a Leslie cabinet in real life but the H&K Rotosphere MKII makes a very nice stereo simulation for recording. And a guitarist friend picked up the current state of the art simulator awhile back, the Neo Mini Vent(ilator) which I haven't tried yet.

https://www.premierguitar.com/articl...ni-vent-review

For spacey swirly sounds the Keeley Seafoam + reinvents the lowly Chorus pedal with 3 different modes. The ADT (Automatic Double Tracker) mode has a real choral effect adding 2 slightly detuned voices along with digital reverb. The original Seafoam mode allows a full blend between the dry tone fully CCW to a really cool vibrato fully CW. The 3rd mode is a dual chorus allowing independent depths for higher pitches (open high E string and up) and lower pitches. But it is the ADT mode that really grabs you by the, er, Graph Techs.

https://robertkeeley.com/product/seafoam-plus-chorus/

https://youtu.be/_uQgB1FiuAk

While I had only been familiar with Keeley's analog designs I am really knocked out by what he is doing in the digital realm as well. His Memphis Sun pedal also uses ADT as his team recreates some very authentic slapback and reverb sounds from the early rockabilly recordings at Sun Studios.

Steve A.

P.S. As for the Roland AP-7 Jet Phaser from the 70's I had one for doing the Ernie Isley thing when playing in a soul band in 1977 (we were the house band for a private club in East Oakland that stayed open all night. The members kept their own booze bottles behind the bar so there were no alcohol sales, just a lot of drug sales I imagine.)

[Mark Hammer]

I will put in a plug for the Behringer Space C. It is a clone of the old 4-button Boss DC-2. The DC-2 used two counterswept bucket brigade chips, such that as one was going sharp, the other was going flat. Beyond having two parallel voices added to the dry signal, the combined sharp+flat aspect meant that it never sounded like the pitch wobble inherent to regular chorus pedals.

The original Boss unit used 4 "radio buttons", where pressing any single one disabled the others. The Behringer version uses a much cheaper set of buttons, which not only permits pressing more than one at a time, but also allows for the effect to be engaged when none of them is pressed. That's my favorite setting for my unit. A lovely slow-Leslie swirl, that rides the zone between chorus and flanging. The pedal provides stereo counterswept outputs. Use of companding (it is a clone of the DC-2, not just "inspired by") keeps it pleasingly hiss-free. Not sure they are still being produced. I bought mine on sale for $30Cdn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA4gVuhM6BM

[Steve A.]

I will put in a plug for the Behringer Space C. It is a clone of the old 4-button Boss DC-2. The DC-2 used two counterswept bucket brigade chips, such that as one was going sharp, the other was going flat. Beyond having two parallel voices added to the dry signal, the combined sharp+flat aspect meant that it never sounded like the pitch wobble inherent to regular chorus pedals.

One of my regrets in life was not buying a DC-2 when I saw one in a music store in the late 80's... I already had a CE-2 so why the heck would I need a DC-2?!? D'oh!

LINE 6 includes a Dimension model with their M5/M9/M13 boxes - I wonder how that compares with the Boss...

Behringer also makes a UV-300 clone of the Boss VB-2 vibrato which Lonnie Mack used on his big tours in the 80's instead of hauling around his Magnatone amps.

Steve A.

P.S. The Keeley Seafoam + also has a flanger mode accessed by internal DIP switches. I was wondering why they don't run it out to an accessible toggle switch but I suspect that it connects to the digital chip. Back in the late 80's there were jumpers on the mobo that I tried running out to a case mounted switch. It did not work because of the latency introduced by the 16" of wire. Darn!