Jack White's Eventide collaboration yields Giallo inspired Knife Drop Octave Fuzz with Monophonic Analog Synth

Jack White has done it again! - producing his most exciting pedal collaboration since the Gamechanger Plasma Coil - at least for me. A cool off-kilter Octave Fuzz combined with Analog Monophonic Synth - which delivers suitably creepy supernatural horror thriller Giallo tones!

The keywords here are texture and ambience - where this delivers soundtrack-like atmospheric tones - perfectly timed for Halloween surely!

Interestingly - even though I have the yellow limited edition Plasma Coil - for all the other releases I much prefer the standard editions. And for the Knife Drop - the standard black version looks so much better to me than the all-yellow limited variant.

Controls - Synth [Attack], Drive [Resonance], Level [Filter Cutoff], Alternative Endings [Alt Button], 5 Presets / Global Settings / MIDI / Expression, Active LED Button : Green = Pre-Gain Filter / Red = Post-Gain Filter, Octave LED Button : Green = Upper Octave / Red = Upper & Sub Octave, Active Bypass Footswitch, Octaves Footswitch.

Ports - TRS In [Mono / Stereo Switch], 1 Out, 2 Out, [Guitar / Line Level Switch], Expression, Mini-B USB!, 9V DX [-] @ 500mA (4.5W).

As Henning points out in his demo - there are some odd interface choices here both by Eventide and Jack White - in terms of your needing a separate pedal to be able to change presets for instance - which seems somewhat nonsensical. And I know this is an older hardware platform - but it is inexcusable to be launching a pedal in this day and age with any other USB standard than C!

So there are some really cool presets onboard  - but you need something like a Barn 3 OXU Three at $99 to access those. Apparently the usual trick for this format of holding down the right hand footswitch to scroll between presets doesn’t work - it just shunts you back to Preset 1 all the time - presumably as specified by Jack!

So the verdict is that it’s a cool sounding pedal - but somewhat clunky to operate and fairly flawed in several departments.

For me Jack’s worst pedal to date is his MXR Double Down collaboration - as it’s a little too specific to Jack’s own very specific usage requirements - where it doesn’t make any sense for use in my rig or any proper stereo rig for that matter.

I am determined to get in one of these Knife Drops at some stage - but it means getting an OXU Three footswitch also - which makes that combination way more clunky than it needs be - and way more expensive. It’s like certain pedals I’ve comes across with onboard presets - but you need an extrnal MIDI controller to access those - which to my sensibilities is all kinds of wrong!.

That to me is just inherently poor pedal design. Pedals should be able to function fully as a standalone solution - you should not need to plug in other peripheral or an App - to get a part of the pedal’s control interface to work.

Also, as Henning alludes to on the knob front - that said Eventide Hardware Format normally has 6 knobs - for easy independent control of all the key parameters. While Jack White has obviously decide to strip this back to just 3 with Alt / Secondary Params, as presumable he doesn’t access the secondary parameters much - or otherwise doesn’t want them to be easily able to be nudged away from their dialled in settings.

The Limited Yellow variety is only available from the Third Man Hardware Webstore - while the Black Standard Edition is more widely avaialable at leading international dealers - including Andertons for instance - where the Knife Drop goes for £329 vs the original $299 price tag in America!

The Barn 3 OXU Three is not available in the UK, but goes for £134 on Thomann - so for me it would be an outlay of £329 + £134  - which makes it a rather pricey £463 level acquisition - which is significantly more than the Chase Bliss Clean - with is also on my wishlist - €469 / £390.

I’m going to have to process that and mull over it for a while. There’s much I like about the Knife Drop - but there’s a lot here that really annoys me too!

The Knife Drop overlay cards with the different presets settings marked up are pretty genius - but I’m not sure they fully help outweigh all the challenges here!

In any case you can read up more on the Eventide Website.

How are you all feeling about this release? It’s currently ’nice-to-have’ for me!