let's talk PHASING

Interesting that flanging seems to have a generally known inventor/time and place of invention, but not phasing.

Me, I just dig that funky underwater sound that comes from my

http://www.pulseonline.com/boss/BigPH3.jpg

alsow. reich's early stuff -- that was done by reocrding the same thing at diff speeds wasn't it?

George Martin furthered flanging techniques, along with Jimi Hendrix on "Axis: Bold As Love".

The effect was given its name by John Lennon in 1966. However the term used by The Beatles is now known to have specifically referred to flanging's 'parent' process, automatic double tracking (ADT), which was invented in April 1966 by Abbey Road engineer Ken Townshend. ADT used linked tape recorders to automatically create a synchronised duplicate of a lead vocal or an instrument. It was created largely at the instigation of Lennon, who hated the tedium of having to 'manually' record duplicate vocals for Beatles recordings -- the only way this effect could be achieved before ADT. The Beatles were delighted with Townshend's invention and used it routinely thereafter; it was the famously non-technical Lennon who is said to have nick-named the ADT process Ken's flanger or flanging (for reasons outlined below).

PSF: So how did your early tape pieces actually come about?

My idea was that I always wanted you to hear what the original sounds were. For "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out," that meant what the people were saying. Because the piece ("Rain") was vocal music. It was setting what they were saying in a way that was appropriate to the subject matter. "It's Gonna Rain" is about the end of the world. In those days, the voice was recorded in '64, you had the Cuban Missle Crisis and so it was very much a part of many peoples' thinking at that time. We were at the point where we could all turn into so much radioactive ash at any given time. So while this guy is preaching about Noah, it's not something abstract that has nothing to do with what's going on in your life.

It was also a time that was fairly difficult for me personally. So "It's Gonna Rain," especially the second half of it, is very bleak. You're literally hearing the world come apart. Technically, it's been said many times, the discovery of the phasing process was within that piece. It happened with those two little Wollensack tape recorders I had (also used on "Phase Piece"). I made identical loops and I thought I would line them up in a particular relationship. Mainly with "it's gonna fall" on top of "rain" with the two channel result being "it's gonna... it's gonna... rain... rain..." with 180 degrees separation.

I put on headphones (which were stereo with each ear with a separate plug going into the two machines). By chance, two machines were lined up in unison. So what I heard was this unison sound sort of swimming in my head, spatially moving back and forth. It finally moved over to the left, which meant that the machine on the left was slightly faster passing in speed than the machine on the right. So the apparent phenomenon in your head is the sound moving to the left, moves down your left shoulder and then across the floor! (laughs) Then after a while, it comes into an imitation and then finally after four or five minutes, you hear "it's gonna... it's gonna... rain... rain..."

By the time it got that far, I though to myself "this is unbelievable." Instead of a particular relationship, here is a whole way of making music, going from unison through all these contrapuntal relationships, all the way back to unison. All the possible relationships, rational and irrational, are there. So I immediately decided to experiment with just how fast that process should happen. Then in the second half of the piece, it got much more complicated, going from two then to four then to eight voices and never coming back together again, which is more in keeping with the text.

Phasing is a word that I coined, but all it really refers to, is a variation of canonic technique. "Phasing" is simply a canon using a short melodic pattern, as opposed to an extended melody, where the rhythmic distance between the first voice and the second is flexible and gradually changing. Piano Phase is a variable canon at the unison. It’s a unison canon where the rhythmic distance between the first voice and the second voice is flexible. Similarly in Violin Phase and Drumming. In Tehillim, instead of there being a melodic pattern, there are real full-blown melodies. Then everyone said, "Oh, those are canons." But canons are canons. Sometimes the subject is short and that’s what people hadn’t heard before; that’s why it seemed to be different. The principle is exactly the same as Sumer is icumen and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, but instead of having a longer melody you have a short pattern.

The reason I thought he might have got it from gamelan, is because gamelan is also constructed from overlapping shifting rhythmic patterns.

xpost

(i just copy/pasted that from another thread)

Orton Phase (1784-1828)

So, to begin with, we can see that what Steve Reich means by the term is very different to what Boss mean by it. Secondly, certain contributors this thread seem to be using "phasing" - in the stompbox sense of the word - as a synonym for "flanging". The two techniques may sound superficially alike when applied to audio signals, but phasing works in an entirely different way, and is electronically much more sophisticated, involving frequency-swept variable-pole notch filters.