Bell Electrolabs Flanger

The Bell Electrolabs Flanger is a vintage flanger pedal made in England in 1979 by Bell Electrolabs. It is a very early entry in the history of the flanger effect, arriving in the same era when the effect was first being put into stompbox form, and it belongs to the company's module system of pedals¹. For a player hunting vintage flangers today, it is a rarity: a British-built pedal from the late 1970s whose design traces straight back to one of the best-known flangers of that decade.

A flanger works by mixing a delayed copy of the signal with the original and sweeping that short delay up and down, producing the hollow, jet-plane sweep players associate with the effect. In the late 1970s that sweep was still a new thing to find in a floor pedal, which is why the pedals of this period, the Bell among them, are of interest to players tracing where the effect came from. The Bell Electrolabs Flanger dates from 1979¹.

Where the circuit came from

The pedal's design has a documented lineage. According to TONEHOME, Chris, one of the three pedal builders at Mike Bell's Electrolab, "lifted" the flanger circuit from the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress, the well-known flanger and filter matrix pedal of the period. The project was then handed to Tony Koorlander, who finished the improvements and design details¹.

So the pedal is not an original circuit but a derivative of the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress, reworked by Bell's builders. That matters to a player shopping vintage flangers: the Electric Mistress sound, with its flanging and filter matrix modes, is the family this pedal sits in. Later relatives in the same line include the Deluxe Electric Mistress, the compact Neo Mistress, and the Flanger Hoax, each of which carries the Electric Mistress name forward in its own form¹.

The module system

The Bell Flanger was not sold as a one-off stompbox in the modern sense. TONEHOME places it within Bell Electrolabs' module system of pedals¹, an approach where individual effect modules belong to a common platform rather than standing entirely alone. That framing is part of what makes the pedal unusual among flangers of its era: most of its contemporaries, from the MXR Flanger to the Ibanez FL-301, were self-contained boxes with their own housings and control layouts, while the Bell was conceived as one module in a family.

How it compares

The Bell Electrolabs Flanger is one of the older names in the flanger field. Other pedals of the era and after took their own paths, and the field the Bell sits in is wide¹:

The A/DA pedal shows how reviewers treated the flangers that followed. Premier Guitar's reviewer found the reissue kept "clarity" even "in a fuzzed-out lead environment"², the kind of high-gain test the earlier generation of flangers, the Bell included, predates. The Bell pedal's distinguishing point is its direct descent from the Electric Mistress design rather than from those circuits: where the MXR and A/DA boxes built their own takes on flanging, the Bell starts from Electro-Harmonix's design and reworks it.

For a player comparing vintage flangers, that lineage is the headline. The Bell is the British branch of the Electric Mistress family tree, built three years into the stompbox flanger era, by a small company working through a module system rather than the mass-production path its American and Japanese contemporaries took¹.

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