9 of the Best Phaser Pedals for Your Consideration

At the more affordable end of the scale we find the single dial, single toggle switch EHX Small Stone Nano - which produces lush tones in the simplest way possible. The 'Color' toggle gives you two different sonic flavours / voicings, and the Rate dial adjusts the speed of the modulation, that's all there is to this - turn up the dial for more swirly / oscillating sounds.

From the simple EHX Small Stone to the marvellous 8 waveform shapes with auto submodes trickery of the Empress Phaser - with 3 different play modes, and 2,3 and 4 phase stage options. Easily one of the most feature-rich phasers available, with huge amounts of tone-sculpting ability. Compared to the Small Stone, this one has 5 dials, and 5 x 3-option toggles. Very slightly on the larger side for my liking, although still fairly compact for what it does. If Empress ever brought out a multi-modulation pedal (a la Mobius), I would definitely go for that, but not sure I want to sacrifice 2 and 1/2 pedals worth of real estate for a single effect type, however feature-rich.

I bought this one almost as soon as it came out, intrigued to see how great a mini phaser could sound. As stated in the intro it contains both of MXR's most iconic phasers - the 45 and 90, you have two buttons to toggle between 45 and 90 mode, and the second button to toggle on the 'Script' variation. A single Speed dial shapes the tone, with slow syrupy phase counter-clockwise and full on swirl in a clockwise direction. Excellent tone for such a small pedal, and plenty of versatility - everyone should have one!

The Pigtronix combines the phasing with some clever envelope filter manipulation to achieve slightly more unusual phase tones - truly great for anyone in a funk band! Possibly too much for those looking for more classic / traditional phasing, and in some ways is less versatile than the Empress in pure phasing prowess, although offers a slightly broader tone pallet overall. It is certainly an interesting pedal, possibly more for the studio than playing live.

A truly lush, relatively simple and ever so smooth Stereo 'Tremophasing' pedal. Three dials allow you to sculpt the tone - Velocity | Trajectory | Cosmology - the first being the usual Speed / Rate dial all phasers have, Trajectory is in effect 'Waveform', while 'Cosmology' is a six-way mode selector - 3 phase modes, 2 tremophase modes and a single tremolo only mode. For those looking for something a little bit different, yet simple to control and massive sounding - this is your pedal!

This is another one of Subdecay's flagship pedals - sits nicely alongside the Starlight DLX, but occupies a slightly smaller form factor than that. It features 11 waverform Shapes and a dual-action Speed dial with several modes / ratios. For the phase enthusiast, this is probably your holy grail, and if you can get your hands on the previous purple version, you will find that even more versatile - with 4, 6 and 8 stage phasing options. Subdecay designed the new one to be easier to handle and seem to have drawn a leaf from Strymon in aiming for a more easily reachable sweet spot. The old purple pedal had more textural chops, but could get speaker-bursting nasty too - which is something that has been eliminated from its replacement.

You can't really go wrong with most TC Electronic pedals - generally very simple to use and dial in a tone, with the added benefit of the immense TonePrint library for more unique tones. A 3-way toggle allows you to select between Vintage, Smooth and TonePrint modes, while 4 dials adjust the tone - Speed | Depth | Feedback | Mix - equally importantly this is a stereo in and out pedal. Quite the different concept versus the above Wombtone, and obviously full digital versus analogue with digital controls - definitely a great option for you board - at a very reasonable price.

A slightly different take on a phaser - featuring 2 parallel phasers - a top voicing default 10 stage phaser, and a second voicing selectable at 4, 6 or 10 stages with different carry-through secondary effects - Regen, Pitch and Filter. All the dials are pretty self-explanatory while the Tweak dial adjusts both Pitch and Filter settings depending on what mode you are in. You can employ just a single phaser by turning down the 3 central dials in the top row. You can of course get some lovely warbly and swooshy textures with this pedal if that is your thing, it is of course a relatively large enclosure but really quite feature rich and fairly unique - and it has 4 presets. I currently don't harbour any desires to add more phasers, beyond the Wombtone, but would definitely consider the Vanguard, Quasar DLX and Deluxe Moon. There's also an older regular Subdecay Quasar - which you should grab immediately if ever you see it on Reverb.com - it is unfortunately long since discontinued.