Doctor?

Please tell me what guitar effect that is at 2:38 of this song. I really like that. I love throwing muses and all the bands connected.

My money is on a phaser. It's hard to tell from that quality of recording, as phasers and flangers can sound the same, but judging from the lack of ring modulation on it, I'd say phaser.

The initial "Whooooosh" right at 2:38 seems suspiciously dropped in, as if it's a spot sample from a keyboard, but she could just have cranked the settings then backed them down a bit for the rest of the solo.

i noticed she kept looking down at the pedals so i doubt its a keyboard thing. i was thinking some type of delay thing. but i wanted to find out what it was so it wouldn't drive me batty.

Animadversion wrote: i noticed she kept looking down at the pedals so i doubt its a keyboard thing. i was thinking some type of delay thing. but i wanted to find out what it was so it wouldn't drive me batty.

Well you were right. Phasers and flangers both work by mixing the direct signal with a copy which has been slightly delayed. In fact it's hard to explain a real difference in them, a phaser can be thought of as a flanger with odd settings. Flangers (called so, because they emulate "flanging" or "skying" popular in the 1960's and early 1970's where one would play two copies of a track on side by side open real tape machines and then gently touching the tape flanges on one machine, then the other), are far more common, mainly since you can easily make a flanger do phaser-like things but phasers don't really reciprocate.

Edit: it COULD also be a bog-standard Wah pedal (a synth's resonant filter with a pedal attached, but never tell a guitar luddite that), but the tone seems much too delicate for that.