Third Man {Hardware} x Donner Triple Menace Pedal | Evaluation
MSRP: (UK) £99 / (US) $99

Nick Jennison evaluations the Third Man {Hardware} x Donner Triple Menace Pedal — a flexible powerhouse designed to raise your guitar’s sonic prospects. Donner’s first collaboration with Jack White’s Third Man {Hardware} options three distinct results in a single compact unit: fuzz, distortion, and enhance. Every impact is independently switchable, permitting for seamless transitions and mixtures to craft your best sound. The pedal’s sturdy development ensures reliability on stage or within the studio, whereas its intuitive controls make dialing in your good tone a breeze. With its distinctive mix of aggressive fuzz, wealthy distortion, and clear enhance, the Triple Menace Pedal is simply that.



Collaborations between pedal builders are all the time thrilling, and so they usually lead to some actually attention-grabbing and distinctive merchandise — particularly when a high-end, boutique maker joins forces with a mass-producing “reasonably priced” model with big manufacturing assets. I can suppose of some such collaborations, however none of them are as stunning as Donner and Third Man.

For the uninitiated, Third Man is Jack White’s personal gear model (sure, THAT Jack White) — a model that does not truly MAKE something themselves, however collaborates with builders like Beetronics, Coppersound, and Gamechanger Audio to create distinctive, high-end designs. Donner, in contrast, has risen from drop-shipping upstarts to grow to be the brand new kings of the reasonably priced East-Asian gear market. So when Donner revealed the Triple Menace, an all-analogue multi FX pedal co-designed and co-branded with Third Man, our curiosity was very a lot piqued.

This compact, reasonably priced unit is made up of three of the primary “results meals teams” — acquire, modulation (“wobble”), and time-based (“moist”). There is a high-gain distortion, a phaser, and an analogue delay, every with its personal footswitch and easy three-knob management structure. There aren’t any menus, no presets, no order switching, nothing fancy, but it surely’s nonetheless lots versatile.

The distortion circuit is tuned to Jack White’s personal specs to provide what Third Man calls a “threatening rock sound,” and it has a really big selection of each acquire and tone. Crank the drive management, and also you get a thick and meaty wall of distortion, with a low finish that feels barely blown-out like a superb muff-style fuzz. There are many shades of dust available alongside the best way, and it really works simply in addition to a “soiled enhance” right into a broken-up amp, with Sabbathy doom and chewy treble booster vibes all on faucet once you run it into a grimy British-style amp.

The phaser is derived from Donner’s Pearl Tremor, with depth and charge controls for all the things from a refined swoosh to a deep classic throb, and an unbiased stage management to assist stability moist and dry sounds. Sadly, the phaser might be the one factor I do not like in regards to the Triple Menace — however not due to its sound; due to its place within the sign chain. Now, that is unquestionably a case of private choice, however for me, a phaser belongs earlier than distortion, 100% of the time! That mentioned, Jack White is aware of what he is doing, and I completely perceive when you’re extra inclined to belief his judgment over mine!

The delay (labelled “echo”) is taken instantly from Donner’s first-ever pedal, the Yellow Fall. It is a closely filtered, crunchy, and characterful delay that is distinctly “lo-fi,” so when you’re anticipating studio-quality clear repeats, chances are you’ll be dissatisfied, but it surely’s excellent for vibey slapback, on-the-edge washes, and self-oscillation freakouts. A phrase of warning — this pedal solely requires 100mA to energy it, however any lower than that and the delay will begin to behave very unusually, virtually like a gated fuzz. Is {that a} bug or a function? You resolve.

The Donner X Third Man Triple Menace is a really cool pedal with a lot of tonal prospects, and the distortion circuit alone is definitely worth the asking value. It is also somewhat piece of pedal historical past, and most undoubtedly marks Donner out as a model to observe sooner or later!

For extra data, please go to:

For extra of our newest evaluations, click on right here