TC Electronic Flashback

The pedal has four knobs - one of which is a rotary switch - plus a three-way switch, and features selectable effects variations.

In designing the pedal, TC wanted something that was fast, easy and intuitive to use, with the ability to change sounds on the fly with a few knob tweaks.

However, it was also aware that most stompboxes have a core sound - a basic tonality that's purely their own. Something that's fine if you like it, but that you're also unable to change if you grow tired of it. With this in mind, it set about building in a feature to allow access to a number of alternative sounds.

This feature is called TonePrint: the pedal has a USB connection that allows you to import a new sound, a custom 'tuning' of the pedal, from a computer and store it in a special onboard memory slot called up by the TonePrint position of the pedal's three-way switch (or the rotary switch in the case of the delay).

TC has made a number of these alternative 'tunings' available for each pedal, all easily accessed and downloaded into it from a special TonePrint website.

And these aren't just voicings created by some Scandinavian boffin in a white lab coat. Instead, TC has asked a bunch of the world's best guitar players to make TonePrints for the pedals.

The company has given them a specially developed tuning software that allows them to tweak every single aspect of the pedals - parameter settings, what range the pots should have, what the min-mid-max values should be, and so on, to make their own perfect pedal.

The Flashback recalls TC's Nova Delay in the number of distinct effects it offers. Its fourth knob is a rotary switch that can call up nine different delay effects plus the TonePrint setting as well as setting it up as a looper.

The smaller three-way switch sets the timing division for the tap tempo function and offers quarter note, eighth note or both for a multi-tap repeat pattern - tap tempo being implemented by pressing the footswitch and rhythmically hitting the strings (the pedal mutes when you do this).