POLY FLANGER Review

Minimal Audio just came out with their new Poly Flanger effect. As the name suggests, it is a flanger with multiple flanging voices. Flangers are typically made up of a comb filter modulated by an LFO, in this case Poly Flanger uses eight comb filters modulated by an LFO. The “span” control can be used to offset the comb filters to create a chord or atonal flanging quality.

Three different styles offer a variety of comb filter and flanging flavors. You can also remove the modulation if you want to manually control the filter sweep. Poly Flanger’s magic really comes in when you start playing with the “scale” settings. The scale mode quantizes each comb filter to only play frequencies within the selected key. It does this by automatically stepping through and fading each voice based on the note rate. This creates fun morphing arpeggiators and interacts with the modulation in some unique and fun ways.

I enjoy that Minimal Audio managed to still put a unique twist on an effect as simple as a flanger. I’m hoping this one makes its way into current as well, because it would be fun to incorporate into some generative synthesizer patches.