Harley Benton Classic Flanger

The Harley Benton Classic Flanger is an amazing piece of kit, it's very robust and well made - solid metal, great action on the foot switch and firm control knobs, which is important as I do like to get my fingers around a firm knob. The holes are also very tight with good grip.

The effect is exactly as one would expect, it gives that great whooshing jet engine sound in varying degrees: one can set the speed and re-gain fast for a tremolo effect, or kick everything down to 10 o'clock except the speed (at say, 2 o'clock) to get a pseudo chorus sound.

I picked a flanger up specifically so I could get most of the way to a Chorus, Phaser and Flanger in one box - but in reality I was mistaken and that is my fault. This is definitely a great sounding pedal, but if you want a chorus or a phaser sound, at the price of the HB pedals you are better off getting dedicated pedals for them.

The art on the pedal is pretty rubbish design-wise, but the white and black colour scheme is OK and the execution of it is perfect: there are no chips or dents, or masking errors at any point.

I would give this pedal a 'good' rating, because it does what it says on the tin with very little fuss and great quality.

I bought this pedal last year and use it a lot in live gigs and studio recordings. I didn't want to spend a lot of money for a flanger because I thought I would use it rarely to color my clean tone but I was wrong.

The controls :
- speed : works fine between 0-75% but above that it's very sensitive and may take some time to set the desired speed.
- Width & Delay : both affect the "tridimensional" sound of the flanger and I think they are the most important knobs of this pedal. Width can make your sound wider/bigger or narrower. Delay time enhances the effect in an interesting way..hard to describe in words. Actually the flanger effect appeared in recording studios when two tapes were not synchronized properly..in other words there was a delay between them.
- Regen : for me the regen it's like a reso knob found on phaser pedals. It makes the effect subtle or more obvious.

- cons : It's more like a wish..but a mix knob It would have been very useful especially when using it with overdrive. But for the price it's great as it is.