Electro Harmonix Flatiron Fuzz

I was very surprised when I first used this pedal. In a blind test i prefered this one to a "vintage" '91 reissue of the big box Rat. Flatiron has better dynamic, smaller and lighter box, when volume rolled off to clean it up it cleans and retains more bottom than any other pedal of that style. Do not look for any vintage "rat" or any magical LM308 pedals - flatiron beats them all. This is future classic and any corck sniffers will pass this pedal because it is not 20 times more expensive, but this is good, they will leave it alone for guitar players, that look for good pedals with their ear and common sense.

I visited the EHX booth at the 2019 Guitar Summit in Mannheim and was chatting with the representative about distortion pedals. I told him that I loved the sound of the ProCo Rat 2, but that it was just too noisy to be useful to me. He informed me that EHX would soon be rolling out a pedal that was "very similar" to the Rat 2, but with more modern circuitry. Unfortunately, he didn't have a sample on hand for me to try out, so I forgot about it until recently.

I ordered the Flatiron Fuzz from Thomann, hoping that it would fill the void left by my dearly departed Rat 2. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Flatiron offers pretty much the same range of tones as the Rat 2, but without the noisy 1980s circuitry.

It has some additional advantages:

1) The casing is of a modern style which, unlike the ProCo, mounts easily onto my pedalboard with hook-and-pile tape.

2) It is smaller than the Rat 2 and takes less room.

3) The input, output, and power connection are more suitable for a pedalboard.

It also has one of the main disadvantages of the ProCo model - namely a single "filter" (i.e. "tone") knob, which makes it difficult to dial in my tone as precisely as I would like.

The sound, though, is great. I can go from slightly overdriven to buzz-saw distortion to full-on fuzz just like the original, but without the unwanted noise. I also eliminates a pesky Buzzy-rattling sound that my original Rat 2 had.

This is not my only distortion pedal and it is not my MAIN distortion pedal, but it is a great addition to my board and I am very happy with it.

As always, Thomann's service and delivery were superb.

I highly recommend this pedal if you play rock, rad rock, or metal.

USE:
I'm using it in front of a 12ax7/EL34 tube amp on a cleanish setting (because the big muff next to the flatiron does not like the amp too dirty) to play mostly blues and a bit of folk.

PROS:
Easy to get a good sound: A lot of pedals have many bad settings and a few good settings. I was pleasantly surprised by how the flatiron fuzz yields usable tones in almost all the setting positions.

Versatile: This pedal has a wide range from almost clean to heavy distortion. I'd go as far to say that it's a good "first pedal" because it covers a lot of ground with good tones.

CONS:
I have no complaints about this pedal. I really like it. I thought about saying "Unity gain is fairly low on the volume knob", but unity gain is still achievable, and some people might like the available volume range on this pedal.