Usage
Phasing is a popular effect for electric guitar. The term was often used to refer the original tape flanging effect heard on many psychedelic records of the late 1960s, notably "Itchycoo Park" by the Small Faces. By the early 1970s, phasing was available as a portable guitar effect, one of the most notable early examples being the MXR Phase 90. From 1974, Steve Hackett in Selling England by the Pound studio album and tour used this one for his Les Pauls, and from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album and tour used the "phase filter" section in his EMS Synthi Hi-Fli. In the late 1970s, Brian May used large amounts of phasing, in such songs as "Sheer Heart Attack." In the 1980s, Eddie Van Halen, for instance, often used the MXR Phase 90 as part of his signal chain, for example in the instrumental "Eruption" and on the song "Atomic Punk".
Keyboard players also used phasing: in the 1970s, keyboard instruments like the Rhodes, the Eminent 310, and the Clavinet were commonly treated with a phaser, especially in avant-garde jazz. Bill Evans, for instance, used a Maestro phaser on Intuition. The phaser is also used to "sweeten" their sounds. Examples can be heard in Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are", Styx's "Babe", and Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygène on which he used an EHX Small Stone phaser extensively. Tony Banks (Genesis) used an MXR Phase 100 on his RMI 368x Electra piano from 1974 (later he will insert this effect, as well as the fuzzbox, into the Electra's panel); from late 1977 he will also use the phaser (with a Boss CE-1 too) on his Hammond organ, for replacing the Leslie's rotating effect. Daft Punk helped to re-popularize the effect in the 21st century, utilizing it on a number of tracks on their Discovery album in 2001.
In motion picture or television production, the effect created by a phaser is often used to imply that the sound is synthetically generated, like turning a natural human voice into a computer or robot voice. The technique works because the frequency filtering produces sound commonly associated with mechanical sources, which only generate specific frequencies, rather than natural sources, which produce a range of frequencies. A vocoder is a different effect used for similar purposes.
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