Classic examples of songs with flanging include “The Big Hurt” by Toni Fisher, “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles, “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, “A Bad Night” by Cat Stevens, the coda of Jimi Hendrix’s “Bold as Love,” Les Paul’s “Mammy’s Boogie” and Queen’s “Killer Queen.” Flanging is an audio effect made by mixing two identical signals, with one delayed by a tiny, slowly changing amount, usually less than 20 milliseconds. The result is a sweeping, “jet plane-like” whoosh.
The name comes from the early tape method: an engineer pressed a finger on the flange of a tape reel to slow one copy against the other. Here are 7 key examples, in roughly the order the effect developed.
1. “Mammy’s Boogie” (Les Paul)
Les Paul discovered the effect in the late 1940s and 1950s, working with acetate disks on variable-speed record players. On “Mammy’s Boogie” (1952) he used two disk recorders, one with a variable speed control, which makes it an early ancestor of studio flanging.
2. “The Big Hurt” (Toni Fisher)
This 1959 song was the first hit with a very discernible flanging effect. If you want to hear the sweep on a whole record, it is the one to start with.
3. “Tomorrow Never Knows” (The Beatles)
Recorded on 6 April 1966, this was the first Beatles track to feature flanging. Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend had invented automatic double tracking (ADT), and John Lennon is credited with calling the technique “flanging.” By the time Revolver was released, almost every song on it had been flanged.
4. “Itchycoo Park” (Small Faces)
The Small Faces’ 1967 single is one of the two early British pop examples of flanging. It was recorded at Olympic Studios and engineered by Glyn Johns, and the tape flanging is easy to hear.
5. “A Bad Night” (Cat Stevens)
Cat Stevens’ single from the same year was also recorded at Olympic and engineered by Glyn Johns. Together with “Itchycoo Park,” it shows how quickly the sound caught on in British pop.
6. “Bold as Love” (Jimi Hendrix)
The first stereo flanging is credited to producer Eddie Kramer in the coda of Jimi Hendrix’s “Bold as Love” (1967). Listen on headphones to hear the effect moving across the stereo field.
7. “Killer Queen” (Queen)
Queen used a flanger effect on the vocals during the word “laser-beam” in bar 17. It is a neat example of an effect used to illustrate a single word in the lyric.
What Flanging Does
- Two copies of the same sound. One is delayed by a very short, changing amount of time.
- A comb filter. Mixing them creates peaks and notches in the frequency spectrum.
- The sweep. Changing the delay moves those peaks and notches up and down, which you hear as the whoosh.
From the 1970s, solid-state and later digital flangers made the effect available as a pedal or plug-in, so it no longer needed two tape machines.
Final Thoughts
Flanging began as a studio trick with tape reels and is still in use today, more than 50 years later. Start with “The Big Hurt,” then compare “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Itchycoo Park” to hear how the Beatles and Olympic Studios each used it.
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