Other pedals tinkered with depth and also feedback controls, which Electro-Harmonix called “Color” on the Small Stone. The Phase 90 didn’t have anything beyond a rate control utilizing a fixed depth (to great effect) and four stages. You end up hearing a sweeping phase cancellation. But the interesting thing about the phaser is that by definition, the “depth” element of a phaser usually corresponds to the depth of a series of all-pass filters (the number of which is referred to as “stages”), which is then animated with a rate control. The Maxon is the cream of the crop in symbiosis of all the best and essential parts of phase shifting.Īny effect utilizing an LFO (low-frequency oscillator, the motion component of any modulation effect) is composed of two core parts the frequency (modulation speed) and the amplitude (modulation depth). And while options like waveforms, envelope control and step sequencing are good fun, above all, we want a phaser to excel at one thing: cyclically shifting the phase. The simplicity of a good phaser is always one of its strongest suits. This perhaps culminated in the Vintage Series, and with it, the PH-350 Rotary Phaser. It sounded excellent.Īcross all the lines and counting the Ibanez equivalents, Maxon has always produced top-notch effects. I personally have only seen and played just one (the DS-F1 Distortion). When was the last time you heard anyone talking about their Fire Blade series Auto Filter (besides Josh Scott)? And the Auto Filter wasn’t one of three or four there were eight Fire Blade series pedals in all. These lines range from the mundane to the “this could only have come from Japan” sort. In fact, Maxon has released ten wholly separate pedal lines, including many that some players have never heard of, and that’s not including the multitude of nonstandard Maxon boxes such as the Flying Pan and Jetlyzer, or collaborations with other companies. Of course, everyone knows the 9-series as well, but while most Americans think the Maxon name faded out and then returned, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Maybe you’ve heard of those 808-series Ibanez pedals. Hoshino Gakki Co, under the brand name Ibanez, licensed Maxon’s 808-series circuits for its line. Maxon has been in the manufacturing business for longer than one might think, having actually designed all the pedals in the original Ibanez line. Knowing Maxon’s track record, this is definitely in accordance with tradition. And even when I was working in half the music stores in Portland, I laid eyes on less than half of them. Outside of “the delay” and “the overdrive,” many players knew nothing about the entire line. What many people don’t know is that there were eight pedals in this series, all of them absolutely exceptional. The two heavy hitters of this series are and were the AD-900 (along with the AD-999 and AD-999 Pro, two souped-up versions), and the OD-820, once thought as nearly equal to a Klon Centaur in tone and topology. This “vintage series” was packaged in a very distinct cast and sloped enclosure and was double the width of Maxon’s normal offerings. You may recognize this pedal as an afterthought to much popular devices in the same series of devices. Today, that pedal is the Maxon PH-350 the finest phaser ever created. Sometimes though, we have to give credit where credit is due and acknowledge an exemplary unit, one that sits atop the genre. We’ve covered the Seamoon Funk Machine and the Coron Phaser 55-hardly the best examples in their classes, but canonical footnotes of ingenuity. And as is normally the case with technology, the first commercially available product, while undeniably inspirational, isn’t always the finest example in retrospect. We’ve talked a lot about vintage offerings here at Cabinet HQ, mostly for the purpose of illustrating history.
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