The drive is the headline, but the boost is the one you’ll end up using on every other pedal you own
There’s a particular kind of person who walks into a music shop, ignores the wall of guitars entirely, and heads straight for the glass cabinet full of pedals (me).
Flattley Guitar Pedals, a small hand-wired operation out of Sleaford in Lincolnshire, England, builds for exactly that person. And with The Outlaw, their first ever dual pedal, they’ve built something that makes the cabinet person and the “just give me a good rock tone” person want the same thing.
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Here’s what it is. Two circuits, two footswitches, one very good looking box. On the left is the Ace Tone Boost, a transistor-based clean boost that Flattley has sold as a standalone pedal for years. It soft clips, it’s buffered, and it has a proper tone control with enough range to turn it into a treble booster or a bass booster depending on which way you swing it.
On the right is the Plexi Drive, an FET circuit designed to behave like a 12AX7 valve getting pushed, covering everything from a polite blues crunch to full-tilt rock. A small toggle in the middle lets you run the boost before or after the drive.
Then there’s the paint job. Red enclosure, red knobs, red footswitch toppers, red halo LEDs, all sitting under holographic chrome metal flake with silver paisley skulls dipped over the top. Flattley usually does blue. This one is very much not blue.
The Plexi side is the easy sell. Anyone who has ever loved an AC/DC record already knows what a Marshall pushed just hard enough sounds like, and “Plexi in a box” pedals are an entire genre at this point. There are dozens of them, most with a three-band EQ bolted on because the designers didn’t trust a single tone knob to get you there. Flattley trusted the tone knob, and the reviewers who have spent time with it seem to agree the circuit is balanced well enough that you don’t miss the extra controls.
The surprise is the boost. Stefan Karlsson over at Guitar Pedal X, who has more Marshall-style drives on his board than most people have pedals full stop, ended up running the Ace Tone Boost into half a dozen other pedals on his board and reported that every single one of them sounded better for it.
That’s the thing about a good clean boost: it stops being a feature of one pedal and becomes a utility for the whole rig. The Outlaw effectively ships with a free “make it better” button attached to a very good overdrive.
Somewhere in the Happy studio in Newtown there is a pedal drawer that will never close properly, and half of what’s in it exists because someone was chasing a boost that did this. The fact that it’s bundled with a Plexi that would sell on its own is a little unfair to everyone else making dual pedals.
The Outlaw runs on a standard 9V centre-negative supply, pulls a modest 50mA, and lives in a 1590BB enclosure so it’ll fit on a real board. It’s £299 direct from Flattley (around $379 USD), which for a hand-wired, hand-finished two-in-one from a boutique builder is honest pricing before you even get to the sparkle.
Grab one from the Flattley webstore, and read the full Guitar Pedal X breakdown here. Special thanks to Paul Flattley for his continued trust in our reviews.
