Can you implement chorus, flanger and vibrato all in the same pedal?

[fryingpan]

Seeing as they're all time-based modulation effects, it shouldn't be too hard to implement all three effects in one circuit, especially mono (but also stereo is not that much different).

Flanger is short delay (<5ms), with feedback and time modulation (generally slow and deep), mixed with the original signal. Chorus (let's assume two-voice chorus) is a longer delay (up to 30ms), with faster and possibly shallower modulation, mixed with the original signal. Vibrato is usually wet only (but the Jazz Chorus amps mix clean and wet signals in both Chorus and Vibrato modes, I believe), modulated delay. Differences may lie in colouring (filtering and maybe nonlinearities) but essentially you should be able to do this with a delay chip, both analog or digital. (It makes sense to do this digitally today I suppose).

I see pedals that have both flanger and chorus, or chorus and vibrato, but never all three. Maybe I'm unaware of their existence. Something tells me that it should be manageable.

[fryingpan]

Seeing as they're all time-based modulation effects, it shouldn't be too hard to implement all three effects in one circuit, especially mono (but also stereo is not that much different).

Flanger is short delay (<5ms), with feedback and time modulation (generally slow), mixed with the original signal. Chorus (let's assume two-voice chorus) is a longer delay (up to 30ms), with faster modulation, mixed with the original signal. Vibrato is usually wet only (but the Jazz Chorus amps mix clean and wet signals in both Chorus and Vibrato modes, I believe), modulated delay. Differences may lie in colouring (filtering and maybe nonlinearities) but essentially you should be able to do this with a delay chip, both analog or digital. (It makes sense to do this digitally today I suppose).

I see pedals that have both flanger and chorus, or chorus and vibrato, but never all three. Maybe I'm unaware of their existence. Something tells me that it should be manageable.

[Mark Hammer]

Conceptually, yes.  But you should note the following:

1) Because chorus covers a delay-range slightly longer than that of flanging, the lowpass filtering for anti-aliasing and noise-reduction purposes tends to be different.  Indeed, some of the most treasured flangers have less lowpass filtering, because they can sweep down to sub-millisecond delays, and employ much higher-frequency clocks.  So any lowpass filtering that makes chorus more palatable may rob the flanger of its character if you simply switch clock-frequency ranges to achieve different delay times.

2) Much like the difference between phasing and Uni-Vibes, flanging, chorus and vibrato employ different LFO speed ranges.  The slowest audible sweep for vibrato is still faster than the slowest audible sweep for chorus, which is in turn faster than the slowest audible sweep for flanging.  You CAN still use a single min-to-max sweep range from a single LFO, but be aware that you may find that all the usable sweep rates for chorus and vibrato clustered into the last few degrees of pot rotation.

3) Flanging may use feedback to emphasize the location of peaks and notches, and also invert the feedback for different sounds, but neither chorus or vibrato use feedback of any kind.  So you'd need to include lifting the feedback path when converting from flanging to either of the other two.

4) Vibrato tends to want a different LFO waveform than chorus, and for some speeds so does flanging.  A big part of what made the Boss CE-1 so pleasing to the ears was that it used a different LFO waveform (sinusoidal) for the vibrato mode.  At medium-fast to fast speeds, flangers can make use of the same triangular LFO that chorus pedals use.  But at slow speeds (e.g., one sweep cycle every 3 seconds or longer), they sound better with what is called a "hypertriangular" waveform, that is triangular at the "top" and sinusoidal at the "bottom".  That allows the sweep to get through the sweep is what feels like a "faster" fashion as it sweeps upward, and then slow down as it gets closer to the bottom of the sweep range, making the movement of the notches and peaks more obvious.  Some phasers use this as well.  The older Small Stone phasers changed the LFO waveform to be hypertriangular in the slow/high-resonance range.

That said, ALL of this can be circumvented by design.  You can build in switches to shift the sweep range of the LFO, engage/cancel the feedback loop, bump the lowpass filtering over a bit and modify the LFO waveform.  I've seen multiple magazine construction projects that do just that.  It just makes for a more complicated pedal, and generally one that provides compromises, rather than "ideal" sounds from each of the effects.  In the various chorus pedals I've made, I've included a "delay range" switch that changes the flavour of the chorus, and overlaps with that flanging range that is good for slow Leslie effects; swirl, rather than `jet plane`sweeps.  So it can be done.  I guess it just depends on what you`re aiming for  and what you expect.

[Scruffie]

The Polychorus/Echo Flanger does this.

[Fender3D]

The Polychorus/Echo Flanger does this.

TC Electronics SCF too

[Mark Hammer]

The Polychorus/Echo Flanger does this.

TC Electronics SCF too

I've got an SCF, and while, yes, it does all three, it does not do them optimally.  And that's my point.  You CAN make a pedal that achieves all three, but can it do the best job of each one, or does it simply achieve a reasonable compromise?  If the compromise is good enough for your needs, fantastic.  But you can't turn a rotary switch (or a 3-way toggle as in the SCF) and have a Small Clone turn into a VB-2 or an A/DA Flanger.  You can make it "boing-ey", and you can make it more swirley than doubley.

The Echoflanger, and the MXR Flanger/Doubler use different amounts of delay-capacity for the different effects.  The  Echoflanger switches from two down to one SAD1024 to go from "echo" to flanging, and the MXR unit switches between BBD types when switching modes.

[ElectricDruid]

+1 agree with Mark. It's possible, but it finishes up either being a big complicated thing with variable filters and switchable delays and LFO ranges and whatever else, or it finishes up with a lot of compromises. In some ways, a couple of different units is easier.

If you were doing it in a DSP, you could do it, because it'd be easier to make all the changes to the filtering and so forth without adding anything to the hardware. In the analog world, it gets to be a lot of parts.

[Kevin Mitchell]

The Polychorus/Echo Flanger does this.

+1
That thing is awesome. Also has slapback delay.

-KM

[baklavametal]

you could make all the needed parts (filters, LFOs, etc.) for all three effects to sound the best and then switch those parts to BBDs, Clocks, etc. using something like this: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/ad75019.pdf and a microcontroller

[fuzz guy]

I don't know about it doing the "best job" of all three effects, but a good 4 knob flanger covers a lot of modulation ground. My MXR M117R can easily cover all my chorus/flanging needs. I'm not really a fan of vibrato, but I imagine If I set it for a chorus sound and turned up the speed it would get me there.

There's definitely digital pedals that can cover all that ground. I wouldn't have any idea about how to build one though.

[12Bass]

My SAD1024 A/DA clone produced chorus, flanging, and vibrato... when it still worked that is; brought it over to a friend's place a couple months ago and his five-year-old son yanked on a cable and pulled everything down and I suspect the SAD1024 got killed somehow.  Haven't had the heart to troubleshoot it yet.  All I did to get vibrato was to add a SPST toggle that switches the clean path in and out (delay path + modulation = vibrato).  IMO, the A/DA design produces excellent chorus and flanging sounds.  Chorusing while set in odd harmonics mode sounds particularly nice.