FL-9 Mods

[Mobisimo]

Howdy all,

Is there a mod to thicken up the overall flange on an fl-9?

Thanks in advance.

[Mark Hammer]

What do you mean by "thicken"?

The trick here is to convert your terms for tone into some equivalence with an electronic process or action.  Once that is identified, practical and specific suggestions about what to change can be made.

[Mobisimo]

Good call man; sorry bout that.

The FL-9 is really subtle.  I wonder if there is a way to make the flange more noticable/bigger, if you get what I'm saying.  
Maybe it is a matter of changing a cap for more bass.  Or possibly changing the resistor that blends the signals.  However, the schematic and layout for this effect are not easily accessible (I've never seen one), so this is kind of hard.

[jsleep]

If your FL9 is subtle, there's something wrong with it.  It's not a subtle flanger.  Not sure how to tell you to trouble shoot it.

JD Sleep

[Mobisimo]

That's disappointing.  Maybe that's why the dude was selling it.
Alas.  Thanks for making me aware of this.  I imagine I would have been at my tone quest with this thing for a long time otherwise...

[Mark Hammer]

Subtlety in flangers happens for a couple of reasons:

1) Wet/dry balance needs to be close to 50/50 for maximum notch depth.  If wet/dry balance is set by a trimpot and radically off, it may be easy to adjust.

2) How much wet signal there is to actually mix in will depend on the biasing of the delay chip.  They need to be biased just right to actually carry signal from one end of the chip to the other, and if misbiased there will either be a weak delay signal at the chip's output or not signal at all.  There is quite often a trimpot on board for this adjustment, though many companies use fixed resistors too, or set the trimpot stable with a drop of glue once adjusted.  Your vendor MAY have accidentally moved it, though.  It happens.

3) Delay range.  Although being capable of ultra-short delays (<1msec) adds a great deal to the tonal quality of flangers, that added value is most obvious when the pedal can sweep from very very short (<500usec) to very long (>12-15msec).  If the delay range is fairly restricted, say hemmed in from 500usec to 4msec, then the sweep will be subtler, largely because it never sweeps down low enough to produce many notches in the range of the lowest order harmonics, or ntoches that are very close together.  For example, a delay of 4msec will only produce low notches at 250hz, 500hz, 750hz, etc. , where a delay time of 10msec will produce them at 100hz, 200hz, 300hz, 400hz, etc.  

Indeed, a great part of the sound of flangers comes from the sense of the signal becomng increasingly "infected" with noches, and then getting "cured" of them.  This is why they sound quite different than phasers, which have a fixed number of notches no matter where they are in their sweep cycle.  This is also why chorus pedals, with a longer delay range (often around 4-20msec), sound "thicker".

This is the long way of saying that if the first two reasons aren't to blame, you may be able to shift the delay range a wee bit to "thicken" things up more to your liking.  How?  There will likely be either an MN3101 or an MN3102 clock chip in there, and a small value capacitor (usually<500pf) right beside it.  Increasing the value of that cap will move the delay range by a proportional amount.  So if the cap was 100pf, adding a second 100pf cap in parallel would multiple the delay range (shorterst AND longest delays) times 2.