Jack White is the undisputed king of gear collabs – and it’s not even close.
In the past few years, the Third Man Hardware brand has shared R&D adventures with the likes of Anasounds (on La Grotte, a real spring reverb pedal), Chinese budget gear giant Donner (Triple Threat, a high-gain distortion, phaser and echo analogue multi-effects pedal), with Eventide on a “commanding new effects pedal that merges aggressive octave fuzz with earth-shaking analogue synth tones” – the Knife Drop.
It’s only been a few months since Third Man Hardware unveiled the Roto-Echo, a compact delay pedal made in partnership with Black Mountain that has an integrated roller wheel. White has a full-range of signature guitars and a guitar amp with Fender (the Triplecaster electric guitar, Triplesonic Acoustasonic Telecaster, and the Pano Verb tube amp).
We could go on; MXR, Gamechanger Audio, Mantic Flex, Coppersound…. And now we have the Troika, a two-hander between Third Man Hardware and JHS Pedals, and it looks pretty special.
The Troika is a studio-grade delay pedal with 1/4” and XLR inputs to accommodate guitar and vocals. It is designed for your pedalboard or the studio. And although it was released just last night, the chances are – especially if you are a fan of White – you will have already heard it on record.
“We got this prototype right before I was working on my album called No Name, so we used this a lot, on the vocals and guitar, guitar solos, and synths, organ sounds and stuff,” says White. “Once it’s on the table next to your console, I’d just keep using it – the ease of use is so great. It has an amazing sound to it, and it’s really mechanical, and I love mechanical things.”
White had been using it live, too. You might have seen one on his mic stand. He got the idea for the pedal from the Fab Delay, a boutique/vintage build from Honda Sound Works in Japan. The Fab Delay (not to be confused with the brilliant and budget-friendly Danelectro Fab Delay) is a collector’s item; because it’s maybe the one pedal that JHS Pedals supremo Josh Scott has never seen before.
The Fab Delay was “in the neighbourhood” of what White was looking for but the sliders went from left to right, and that was hard to move by foot. If they moved the sliders so they operated vertically, and added a third slider, they might be onto something.
And then that would become the basis for the Troika, a delay with three sliders. The Repeats and Distance controls are on either side of the Volume slider, making them more accessible by foot.
Scott went to town on beefing it up so you can use it with microphones and other instruments, making the Troika something unique on the market – the studio delay for vocals and electric guitar, and bass guitar, and whatever keys you want to put through it, and also one that’s pedalboard-friendly.
It has a delay time from 80ms up to 1 second, a mic preamp with adjustable gain control from +20dB to +80dB, and passes +48V of phantom power but does not provide it.
“There’s never been a delay pedal, to my knowledge, with combo microphone/instrument input, input transformer, output transformer, mic gain,” says Scott. “We pulled stuff from our Colourbox [preamp/EQ/distortion based on a Neve console]. You’re dealing with the same transformer in our Colourbox, and then another output transformer, so both of those take care of noise. They take care of conversion issues with impedances, and they add a weight to them, you could say. It’s a pro-audio delay unit for your feet or your desk.”
The Troika is available with the standard black enclosure, priced £270/$349, and in limited edition yellow, available exclusively via Reverb and priced $369 and probably no doubt already sold out by the time you read this.
For more details, head over to Third Man Hardware or JHS Pedals.
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