Linear controllers, such as LQG/LTR controller, have been investigated to control flexible link manipulators. The performance and complexity of these depend largely on the linearized model upon which the controller is designed. In this study, singular perturbation model is tested in designing a LQG/LTR controller for a flexible link manipulator. The order of the resulting controller is much lower than the one based on a full model. Through numerical study, it is shown that the performance of the proposed controller reaches reasonably to the one based on the full model.