Boss BF-2 Flanger

I think most people don't realize it makes all the differance in the world where you place this flanger in the effects line.

Place this flanger between the guitar and the overdrive and one gets a nice mellow flange.

Put it between the overdrive and the amp and the flange becomes much more extreme.

I personnally like the flanger between the guitar and overdrive.

I know, I know, Boss catalogs show the flanger after the overdrive. I guess they wanted to make sure you could hear it!

If you like flange you will like the BF-2.

I get a great Robin Trower sound with this pedal.

It's real quiet too. Anyone who complains of noise probably has their distortion turned up to high or their guitar needs help.

Turn your guitar volume off and your distortion off and see if you still have noise.

I've been stomping on my BF-2 for 20 years and not one problem. Does that classify it as reliable?
As far as my other Boss pedals go...yes, the jacks get lose sometimes and the rubber switch grommet deteriorates away. Sometimes the footswitches need replacement. Still I can't think of anything more reliable that I have ever owned. Maybe a wall clock but I don't step on that thousands of times or throw it in to the back of my van on a regular basis.

Never needed these guys even after owning over 20 pedals for over 20 years

If I lost it I would buy another.

it's not bad, you really have to work at the knobs to get it right, not great for a straight out of the box thing. but once you egt the hang of it it's easy enough, the manual helps.

I'm playing this with a cheap strat knockoff with Fender '63 single coil pickups in neck and mid, and a DiMarzio PAF humbucker in the bridge. I'm also using a Dunlop wah with my marshall VS30R. I'm not really huge on flange, but it has it's uses, this one was a little weak and metallic for me. Soemtiems it's very overpowering on your sound, depending on what that may be, for me, that's a lot of stuff, rock, alternative, jazz, blues, anything that tickles my fancy at the moment. For a sixties, psychadelia-type feel, this IS NOT A GOOD PEDAL, it's better suited for a more "nu-metal" sound, which I a not into. I like my danelectro A LOT better, even Digitech's RP-300 flange is better with the right tweaks (but thats a whole separate review, comign soon)

it's a boss, ive kicked this thign around, it's fallen off a six foot stage, its even gone down a flight of stairs and it's still just like the day i bought it. i would use it without backup if it was my primary flanger, but I use my danelectro over this live.

never needed it, but i dont like the website

It's a great buy if you want a sterile, metallic flanger, but if you're like me, and into more sweeping, soft flange, then go out and BUY A DANELECTRO!!!!!!! the danelectro was a much better deal and i got it for fifteen bucks less, but I still use this sucker from time to time because I would hate to waste $105 on somethign i dont use.

This Boss Bf-2 Flanger is NOT all that easy to use. The manual didn't really halp explain to me what the different knobs do, but i kinda figured it out. I also have looked on the web for patches which help a lot, easier then finding sertant sounds myself. Maybe I'm just really dumb, but it takes a lot of expirementing to get a grasp of this thing.

I use a Fender Mex. Strat w/'74 american pickups (for clean) or a Fernandes Rev. Pro (for dist.) into the Bf-2 Flanger into a Dunlop 535 CryBaby Wah into a Boss OS-2 Overdrive/Dist. (the DS-1 SUCKS) into a Mesa Boogie (Caliber something i think). I got it because i wanted to get really strong chorus sounds but also be able to get Eddy VanHalen finger-tapping flanging sounds. This does NOT get any sort of Eddy sound at all! It's alittle too fast and sounds kinda "distant" to me. It does get good chorus sounds though, better than Boss chorus pedals if u ask me. It's so versital -> it's amazing. It also sounds awsome on bass! I do really like this pedal and can get amazing/ORIGINAL sounds out of it and it's not really noisy (only when i have the OS-2 on it "swooshes" the feedback).

It's Boss!

Don't know yet.

I play a lot of hardcore/speed metal and classic rock, some funk. This pedal is good when playing clean arpegios and fast distorted riffs, It shouldn't be used a all the time though - or it's just too much. I would replace this pedal if it were stolen but i'd get it used off ebay only, or try out the BF-3. Overall, this pedal has become apart of my sound and i use it when ever i can, it's better then buying just a chorus pedal. Also, It's not really a good "classic" Flanging sound, but a nu-metal sound.

Easy to use, except if you're trying to re-create a specific sound. The controls tend to affect one another and it takes quite a bit of tweaking to really get it right.

Unlike most BF-2's out there, this one was used with synthesisers, especially with digital ones which lacked internal effects. An analogue pedal like this can spice up the sound very well, though the BF-2 is perhaps not the best choice for this.

Even on light settings, you can tell that the flanger is doing its job and it can emulate a "filter sweep" effect very well. On the downside, it is quite noisy and it colours the sound considerably. Things can get problematic if you have to switch it on or off somewhere in the middle - the change in level of the sound is very noticeable and abrupt.

Very good. Never had any problems with it and it performed flawlessly.

I haven't dealt with Boss/Roland regarding the BF-2, but they Slovenian branch is generally very helpful and knowledgeable.

The BF-2 does breathe life into boring, sterile sounds, but not quite enough to justify its presence in my set-up. For an analogue pedal, it sounds surprisingly cold and uninspiring. Also, the flanging rate wasn't slow enough for me. This is why I sold it after nine months. It did make it on some of my songs - please e-mail me at "sartre@siol.net" to hear it in action.

easy to get the hang of, just turn the knobs til you find what you want.

i use a gordon-smith sg> ds1>phaser/flanger>50top head. i play heavy dirt-rock (sabbath/stooges). i like to keep it simple and play loud. i bought this pedal cos i love my ds1 so much, i figured boss are pretty much the business. im afraid i found this pedal pretty dissappointing, especially after i tried a danelectro hash-browns and compared the two. i dig phase more than flange really, but this pedal dissappoints on two levels: it colours your sound , and its very processed-sounding.

totally relaible, it's a boss.

never dealt with them

i guess it depends what you are after, and if nu-metal is your thing then this probably is a decent flanger. i just found it really sterile sounding, with a nasty metallic edge. i'm looking for smooth analogue swoosh sounds (which i have found with my old Ross phaser), and this just doesnt cut it. i tried a boss phaser too, and i have the same complaints about it too. even my #20 dano flanger sounds better than this!!! i suggest you shop around before going for this pedal, it just wasnt for me.

4 knobs, fairly eay to get a good sound. Just mess with it for a little bit and you're set.

OK sounding flanger. I'm not too big on flanger, but it did its job. I played this through either a Boss DS-1 or an 80s ProCo Rat. It sounded pretty good with them. The only problem was that this pedal was noisy, even with humbuckers (mustang w/ JB jr). The flange is definately NOT weak; however, it was a bit too much. No matter how I adjusted the level, the flange seemed to overpower my sound when I didnt want it to.

An atmoic bomb could go off and all that would be left would be everyones' Boss pedals and roaches.

Never dealt with Roland/Boss

If you're looking for a pretty good flanger, this is fine. I got this one cause it was fairly cheap. I sold this pedal months ago, because it ended up collecting dust. If someone had stole it (or if I wanted another flange), I'd probably look at some other companies like Electro-Harmonix or MXR.

quite simple., versatile & fun.

Quite versatile. Thinking about running two with 2 different sounds preset on it, so i dont' have to bend over & change knobs from song to song. not really "transparent".

this is why i'm posting! PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT I BROKE A BOSS PEDAL! I STOMPED IT SO HARD IN A BOUNCE/JUMP AT A GIG THAT ONE OF THE SCREWS FLEW OUT OF THE COVER PLATE ON THE LEFT SIDE & THE COVER FELL IN, CRUSHING THE SWITCH INSIDE! BUILT LIKE A TANK? MY 150LB ASS BUSTED IT! of course, it lasted for like 5 years first.... i'll just replace it soon.

n/a

Four knobs... Only difficult if you dont know what to do with a flanger... The knobs have weird names, but if you look in the instructions it explains it to you well, and you can dial in any flange sound you want with it...

Im playing a Gibson SG Special into a Peavey Revolution 112... seriously, you can make any sound you want with this pedal, but I bought it in search of the sound Adam Jones from Tool gets, and it took me about 5 minutes flat to figure it out... also a great bass pedal...

You could take a hammer to this thing, then throw it out your window and drive over it in a MAC truck, and then plug it back in, and chances are, it will sound as good, or better... Boss Pedals are built to last...

For any style of music that uses flange sounds, this pedal will do the job... I would absolutely replace this if anything happened to it... The only pedals I can really compare it to out of experience are the Ibanez Chorus/Flange, which is a great pedal, but the Boss BLOWS IT AWAY... UNQUESTIONED... GET A BOSS FLANGER NOW

Easy as anything else

Good in a word, but the main point of this review is to enlighten people to the fact you can tweak plastic screws inside of the flanger, find the bit marked resonance and tweak it and you will find sounds you have not heard, increase it too much and you'll just get wild feedback, this must be the case with one of the reviewers who said this was happening, ther are two other plastic tweakables I think one does gain; anyway I've had fun experimenting, I stupidly didn't remember the original settings when I first started tampering, so the bf2 stayed "broken" "out of control sounding" on a shelf for a while, but today I fiddled with it to get it back to its original state, the results are that it doesn't sound like it did from the box, it sounds better: I can now get this cool sitar effect as well as the good flange, wild vibrato, chorus sounds, it doesn't add any gain when its on and the bass stays the same. all in all I recommend that you also fiddle with the bf2 if it sounds a bit tame and you can customize your pedal.
I'll give it a 8 for its bossness; mxr,ehx good analog flangers are always going to sound best

I trust this pedal, I tell it everything about myself,

never had the pleasure

8 on a 10 scale, which is good enough for anybody

It was kind of difficult for me to find an actual sound out of the pedal that i liked, but when i did, it was a great one. four knobs: Manual, Depth, Rate, and Resonance. I have the Manual around 53%, the Depth around 30%, the Rate around 80%, and the Resonance around 47%.

It's a great flange, but the only complaint i have with this pedal is that when it's on, the volume is noticably increased. I'm not sure of how to solve this problem, without using my volume pedal anyway, and that's kind of a pain. I'm looking foward to the release of the new BOSS BF-3 Flanger. For those who don't know about that, it has all of the same knobs except a mode knob, with 4 modes, including a standard mode, which i'm assuming would be the same as the BF-2 flange. The BF-3 has a tap tempo feature too, which i'm looking foward to, and hopefully BOSS has fixed the whole volume thing, but who knows? I can't complain much anyway, especially with how much i use the pedal...

what else is there to say?

I've heard them get bashed a lot from many many people, but they were pretty helpful to me when i called about the operation specs on some pedals i don't yet have on several occassions. I assume they're pretty crappy with other aspects of customer services, since about everyone else who's talked to them will disagree with me, but here's the way i see it: if i made it a point to make pedals as reliable as BOSS makes theirs, and i spent my time making them with the quality that BOSS does, i wouldn't spend too much time worried about the three that do break out of the thousands and thousands made. I would rather have a reliable pedal that will close-to-never die and talk to a wall than have a pedal that would break down and have customer service console me about the money i wasted. Anyway, they've helped me for what i needed them for, so there you have it.

It's a great flanger, but the only complaint i have with it is the volume change when it's on, like i said above. Hopefully with the release of the BF-3 the volume problem will be fixed, along with other little things to tool around with.