Poly Effects Flat V

The Flat V is a signature overdrive pedal from Poly Effects developed with blues guitarist Josh Smith, announced in January 2023 and on the market by early 2023. It is a gain pedal with two channels that can stack into one another in either order, priced at $399 at launch¹. Where a conventional drive pedal gives you knobs, the Flat V gives you a touchscreen: LED sliders replace the knobs entirely¹.

What it does

Each channel covers the core drive settings: HPF (treble), volume, gain and LPF (bass), set through touch-sensitive sliders shown as strips of pentagonal light³. The two channels are stackable, and each carries two "Sides", or presets, reached by tapping the big pentagonal icon at the center-top of the pedal³. That gives you four stored sounds on the face of the pedal before you even get to the six banks of six presets for saving favorites¹.

Channel B adds synth-style resonant filters that shape its tone, with HPF and LPF resonance controls². Beyond the drive itself, the pedal can throw your tone off course with auto-wah and tremolo effects¹. Poly Effects describes the blending system as the heart of it: you can blend with the waveshapes, MIDI or an envelope that reacts to your playing, and the maker says blending allows very complex tremolo, envelope filter and auto wah style effects².

There is also a built-in oscillator with a sine wave that can be attached to functions. On That Pedal Show, Mick Taylor described it: "it's got a built-in oscillator that you can attach a sidewave to it and take any of those functions", enabling pseudo wah, vibrato and tremolo pulse effects via MIDI expression⁴.

Controls and MIDI

The pedal responds to MIDI continuous controller messages, which opens it up to MIDI pedal control from a switcher or controller. The MIDI map includes⁵:

The resonance controls apply to Channel B's filters⁵.

What reviewers made of it

Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson included it in his 2023 year-end selection, calling it a "Really smart and innovative touch-screen 2-Channel multi-drive with cool modulation function"⁶. MusicRadar's Jonathan Horsley flagged the same combination of features when the pedal was announced: dual footswitches, channel stacking in either order, and the auto-wah and tremolo on top of the drive¹.

The Flat V is a signature overdrive pedal that guitarist Josh Smith has teamed up with Poly Effects to make¹. Poly Effects describes it as a two-channel beast, with dual footswitches, six banks of six presets to save favorite sounds, and touchscreen LED sliders in place of knobs¹. It is priced at $399 USD¹.

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