Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan: Sure You Can Step On It, But It's Nice To Just Look At, Too
As part of the original lineup of effects manufactured by Maxon under the Ibanez brand in the mid to late 70s, the Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan had become something of a phantom phaser before it's re-release this year. Now that a limited run of 777 Flying Pans have been sent out into the world, we get the chance to demo that legendary sound . . . and guess what? Just like 30-year old scotch, overuse will make you dizzy and probably sick. Do not operate heavy machinery while watching this demo.
OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I am Owen O'Malley, and we are looking at the Ibanez FP-777, otherwise known as the Flying Pan. This is the box that it comes in. It's got a sort of '70s style distressed looking logo or screen print on the front because this pedal was originally introduced in the '70s.
Now, the FP-777 is a large pedal. It is a stereo effect. You can see there is a mono input and stereo outs right there. It can be powered by a 9-volt wall wart or a single 9-volt battery. The battery compartment is right here, lovely, we'll just get this together, okay, and there's actually two separate effects built into this pedal. There is a phaser effect and there is a pan effect, bot of them independently switchable, selectable, both of them in stereo. So, let's get this guy hooked up and hear how it sounds.
[FAKING A MOTION TO THROW THE PEDAL] I'm not going to throw it.
All right, so we've got out FP-777 Flying Pan hooked up in stereo. Let's listen to our clean tone here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN BYPASSED]
Let's turn the phaser on.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER]
You'll see that there's a phase select button right over here. I don't know if you can see at the top of it but you can switch between stereo left or right, so you can actually have the phase effect only going on in one of the two channels, left or right, at a time. Over to the phaser controls though, we've got phaser speed...
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER SPEED BEING TWEAKED]
...and our feedback depth, which basically controls the intensity of that sort of like laser beam feedback.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER FEEDBACK BEING TWEAKED]
Here's with feedback down most of the way.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER FEEDBACK BEING TWEAKED]
But real high intensity almost gets jangly. You'll notice that sort of the cycle kind of hangs out on either sides of the extreme for a long time. It almost sounds like there's a moment of no effect and that it whooshes through the dissonant cycle and then kind of hangs out of the other end of that cycle.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED]
Let's turn the phase speed up a little bit and hear what I'm talking about.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED]
Even more prominent at other speeds.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED]
Wah, doo-doo, doo-doo. It almost sounds like it is a triplet rhythm. Anyway, let's turn that off and go over to the pan speed. The pan is just a stereo panning tremolo where in one amp and then where in the other. Let's just have our pan speeds neutral here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PAN SPEED NEUTRAL]
There's no pan depth but it sounded nice, sort of like, you know, neutral -- or not neutral but, you know, a medium level, medium intensity. We're starting to speed up here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PAN SPEED HIGHER]
Now where this effect gets really fun is when we combine the two. Let's turn the phase on here.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER AND PAN COMBINED]
Now right now, we've got both of the speeds up pretty high. Let's keep the phase speed up and turn the pan speed down.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER AND PAN COMBINED]
We can do some pretty silly effects here. We'll turn this pan down a little bit, or rather the phase down a little bit and the pan up.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ FP-777 FLYING PAN ENGAGED, PHASER AND PAN COMBINED]
Pretty cool. These knobs feel great by the way. Look, up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. No! It's the Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan, and I'm Owen O'Malley, and you've been watching Gearwire.Com. Goodbye.
sounds...
A friend of mine has an original FP-777 which i am proudly allowed to use some time... when listening to the review, the original FP777 sounds totally different when talking about the phaser. the pan sounds the same but well, a pan is not a big thing to make...
the original phaser goes way! deeper on the lower side, and is much more linear not like having a peak in the middle if you know what i mean. that "da dang, da dang" does not occur in the original one. actually it sounds more like the 99 phase pedal but with less capabilities.
i need to get a reissue myself to back that up but what i can hear here is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE THE ORIGINAL FP777.
the problem is the optocouplers which are not produced anymore and ibanez just got some others which do not bring the same smoothness and debth as the original ones.
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