The STS-88 by Catalinbread puts a flanger and a reverb in one four-knob box, and the combination is the whole point. The flanger voicing is tastefully designed: not too much metallic airplane swooshing, but enough movement to make your guitar sound like it’s floating in space. Enveloping that modulation in a cavernous reverb turns it into something closer to a texture generator.
I’m super into shoegaze sounds where a distortion or fuzz is just crushing the reverb trails, and the flanging adds a certain something to the wash. The STS-88 is perfect for that.
The top row reads Depth and Rate, left to right. Depth controls the LFO amplitude: how intense the flange sweep gets. Rate controls the LFO speed, from roughly 0.077 Hz up to about 6 Hz. Below those, Mix sits on the left and Reverb on the right. Mix sets the wet/dry balance. I particularly like what it does around 50%: you get the modulated warble and spacey reverb, but the dry signal keeps note definition intact. Reverb controls the decay length; turned fully counterclockwise it drops out almost entirely, leaving a straight flanger, and cranked up it stretches the effect into ambient soundscape territory.
There’s an internal buffer switch that toggles between true and buffered bypass, and a gain trimmer for a touch of extra output. The pedal ships buffered, which is the right call for most rigs.
In the demo above I’ve set up sweeps for all four knobs, so you can hear what Depth, Rate, Mix, and Reverb each do to the same signal independently.
The three main presets map the character well. Spacey Swoosh (depth 5, rate 4, mix 6, reverb 7) is the sweet spot: gentle, rolling sweep submerged in generous reverb. Galaxy Warble (depth 7, rate 8, mix 5, reverb 6) pushes the LFO faster and the modulation wider, more movement but still musical. Tasteful Flerb (depth 8, rate 0, mix 4, reverb 10) is the most unusual: Rate at zero stops the LFO completely and you’re left with a static parked flange soaking in maximum reverb, almost frozen mid-sweep.
The You Bet It Shoegazes preset brings the Beautiful Noise Effects Exploder in front of the STS-88. Fuzz or overdrive feeding into the STS-88 turns the reverb trails into something crushing and atmospheric.
The Walrus Audio Polychrome is the other flanger on this site and the natural comparison. The Polychrome is all-analog BBD, with a Sweep control for the notch filter center frequency, a Feedback knob for regeneration intensity, and a D-F-V blend from dry through flanger to full pitch vibrato. Three LFO shapes (sine, triangle, random) and a parked-filter trick round out the toolkit. That’s a lot of control over the flanger itself.
The STS-88 trades those parameters for the Reverb knob, which changes what the effect fundamentally is. No Feedback control, no vibrato mode, but a built-in reverb that the Polychrome doesn’t offer at all. If you want to shape every dimension of the flange, the Polychrome is more flexible. If you want the flanger-plus-reverb combination in one box with minimal menu-diving, the STS-88 is the one.
Shoegaze and ambient players are the obvious audience. The STS-88 does what it does with almost no learning curve, and it sits well after drive pedals, which is exactly how the signal chain above uses it. It’s also a reasonable space-saver if you’d otherwise run a flanger and a reverb as two separate boxes.
The honest caveats: the flanger here doesn’t go into the metallic, jet-plane extremes that a high-feedback analog flanger can reach, and there’s no LFO shape selection. If classic flange tones with dialed-in feedback intensity are what you’re after, the Polychrome covers more of that ground. But if your sound lives in drifting, reverb-soaked shimmer, the STS-88 gets there directly.
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Get detailed specs on Catalinbread's website
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