Flattley Bass Chief overdrive

For sale is a Flattley Bass Chief, a dirt pedal designed for the bass guitar from Flattley’s premium lineup. Flattley Guitar Pedals is a boutique company based in Gloucestershire, England. If you've never heard of them, you're not alone: neither had I! But the Guitar World review and Paul Flattley's background in avionics encouraged me to give their pedals a try. And I'm glad I did! The Bass Chief impressed me enough that I later bought the Bass Star Fazer as well. (I've since secured a Broughton Sunray and a second Chase Bliss Wombtone MKII so I'm no longer using these.)

To my ears the Bass Chief shines as a medium to heavy overdrive. It can do subtle overdrive, especially with the blend favoring the clean signal, but its voice has a characteristic brightness to it (this can be dialed out with the treble pot) which helps it cut through a mix and which favors a more present overdrive. If you want edge-of-breakup tones this is not the pedal for you; if you want robust excited harmonics with an intact and articulate clean bottom end, then this is the pedal for you. To achieve vintage warmth, keep the treble pot down; for a more aggressive, biting sound keep the treble pot around noon or higher. To limit the clipping to the upper frequencies, keep the bass pot down; to add girth to your tone, turn up the bass pot. This is a pedal where the full spectrum of each pot has usable sounds so you aren't limited, for example, to the area around noon. Also there's plenty of gain on tap so the Bass Chief easily gets into distortion territory when you need it to.

The pedal buffers and splits the incoming signal, one half is distorted by the amount set by the ‘Gain’ control which is then further shaped by the ‘Bass’ and ‘Treble’ controls. The two signal paths meet again at the ‘Blend’ control allowing the original signal to be mixed with the distorted version. Note that at extreme settings of the tone controls a further range of tones can be found using the ‘Blend’ control to cancel parts of the original signal. The overall level of the combined signals can be arrived at by using the ‘Volume’ control.

Flattley pedals are true boutique pedals with some fancy features. They have a halo light ring instead of your standard LED. This diffuses the light in a pleasing way and avoids the piercing light some overly bright LEDs have, especially on dark stages. Both pedals also feature aluminum footswitch toppers for more better contact when switching the pedal on and off. Finally, they have amazing finishes:

The bare aluminum enclosure is abraded prior to painting with the etch primer. The etch primer acts as a anti corrosive layer and allows the primer to bond to the enclosure ensuring a tough resilient paint finish. Multiple coats of base coat primer are applied which are then lightly abraded to remove any blemishes or paint speckles. Then several coats of base color are applied until an even coverage occurs and the base color develops rich smooth depth. Metallic holographic chrome flake is then applied using a clear inter coat which adds that all important Flattley sparkle. The pedal enclosure is now ready to be hydro dipped in its Flattley graphics. This is the process whereby the graphics are applied using water activated film, the residual PVA film is then washed off and the enclosure is then allowed to dry naturally. Once dried the lacquer process begins. Each “Flattley Platinum” pedal has a minimum of three coats of lacquer which are all wet sanded between coats. Once the lacquer has hardened, it is then hand polished using three different grades of polishing compounds and it then has a final polish to achieve a high gloss finish using a wool finishing pad. This process gives the smooth deep luster finish. Check out the additional pictures I've uploaded to see how the finish subtly sparkles under the right light!