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A practical range of gain, from clean-ish through to raunch, combined with a Tone knob that focuses it to push the right buttons, make The Joker a versatile boost/drive asset for your signal chain.
Pros
+
Two modes.
+
Cool artwork.
+
Halo light ring.
Cons
-
It’s not for the budget-conscious among us.
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Be it overdrive, distortion or fuzz, pedals of a certain nature fall into the catch-all category of ‘dirt’ pedals, and The Joker, the latest offering from Flattley, is certainly of that ilk – it even says so on the front panel! What you have here is a pedal with two toggle-switched modes, the aforementioned Dirt and, to take things a stage further, Filth.
Flattley tells us the pedal was inspired by a simple question: what happens if you add controlled distortion to a normally clean booster? And to that end, the designers developed a pedal with a FET-based 12AX7 valve simulation with the aim of achieving a similar sound to an overdriven single-valve amp.
However, this pedal takes it a stage further by adding the Filth mode for more gain and distortion.
In Dirt mode with the pedal’s Gain knob at minimum, the Volume knob (starting from silence) hits unity gain at around 11 o’clock, so anything beyond that will give you a boost – not squeaky clean but with a touch of grit to it and coloured by whatever you have dialled in on the tone knob.
To our ears, that knob is at its most neutral at minimum position, but advancing it starts rolling off bottom-end, and from the midpoint onwards there’s increasing top-end emphasis, heading right into classic treble-boost territory towards its end point. All good stuff for hitting the front-end of your amp in exactly the right way or pushing another dirt pedal.
When you start advancing the Gain knob there’s plenty of those ‘just beyond clean’ tones to explore as you move through low-level break-up and into the more crunchy arena with the flavour of a small valve amp that’s being driven hard. It’s all very playable with fully exploitable dynamic response, pulling back from the dirt to cleaner tone with a softer touch.
Switching to Filth mode, the starting point is somewhere towards the upper end of Dirt mode, so there’s some crossover between the two, but Filth moves very naturally from that crunch into a more compressed, gainier (but not overly saturated) version of it.
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Verdict
Verdict: ★★★★☆
(Image credit: Future/Phil Barker)
Guitar World verdict: A practical range of gain, from clean-ish through to raunch, combined with a Tone knob that focuses it to push the right buttons, make The Joker a versatile boost/drive asset for your signal chain.
Trevor Curwen has played guitar for several decades – he's also mimed it on the UK's Top of the Pops. Much of his working life, though, has been spent behind the mixing desk, during which time he has built up a solid collection of the guitars, amps and pedals needed to cover just about any studio session. He writes pedal reviews for Guitarist and has contributed to Total Guitar, MusicRadar and Future Music among others.
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