Natural chorus effects are the result of several people playing or singing in unison, which produces small pitch differences. Flanging effects were -according to some sources- originally produced by slowing the flanges of an analog recorder's taperolls, thereby changing the speed of the tape slightly (which caused slight detune and delay). An electronic Chorus or Flanger effect is meant to emulate these sound effects.
Chorus and flanger effects are commonly used for creating artificial stereo sounds out of a mono source. By adding chorus to a guitar sound it can also stand out more in the mix. Because of this (and the stereo effect) it may appear to have less bottom. From G-Force version 1.12 you can turn off the Speed parameter, which can sound interesting depending on when it's turned off. The Chorus/Flanger block is a great source of strange sound effects, especially in combination with the Pitch Shifter and different modifiers. For example, if you link a pedal to the speed parameter and quickly increase the Speed parameter to a very fast value nice effects can result.
You can also produce chorus effects with the Delay and Pitch Shift effects.
The Delay parameter in the Advanced Chorus/Flanger allows very fine subdivisions for the delay time, between 0.1 and 45 milliseconds. In the Advanced Flanger you can add Feedback to this and use it like a short delay. In the earliest software versions high Feedback values could cause internal overflow, but it seems this has been fixed, maybe by decreasing the max Feedback.
The Chorus/Flanger block's effects normally use both stereo inputs and outputs. To get a mono effect you can rout a mono input effect block after, but this will normally only block one side of the stereo output, not mix the two sides together. To mix the left and right stereo sides you can connect the panner after the CHO block, or use a Dual delay panned to center (with Delay time set to zero).
If you use the Phase Reverse in the Advanced Chorus/flanger the sound to the right in the stereo image will be exactly 180 degrees out of phase with the left. If you mix these two signals back into mono they will cancel each other out. In order to avoid this the mono input effects in the G-Force mute their right inputs rather than mixing both stereo sides together (see the effect block routing page). The Panner is an exception, since it mixes both left and right sides together, so if you feed a phase-reversed Chorus/flanger signal into the panner the signal will become muted. The same thing will happen if you send a phase-reversed stereo signal into an external mixer and there pan it into mono.
Copyright © 1999-2016 Christian Jacobsson.