Wampler Triple Wreck

WAMPLER TRIPLE WRECK
By Andy Skinner

The Wampler Triple Wreck is the full production version of a pedal Brian Wampler made 100 units of earlier this year.
The unit proved to be so good (and popular) that Brian decided making the pedal as part of his regular product line, but with a few tweaks on top of the original design. As hinted by it`s name, the Triple Wreck is designed to have that Mesa Triple Rectifier sound, a versatile sound with the ability to dial in wads of thick, bottom end friendly distortion.

Features

The pedal has a fully featured EQ (High, Mids, Bass), Gain, Volume, Cream\Crunch dial and a Vintage\Modern switch. Switch wise it has a bypass and also a boost switch. Power wise, it has a normal 9v power in and will also use a battery, accessed by the sole plate. The design of the pedal is in line with a lot of boutique stuff, housed in a rather large (tough) metal box in a powder coat blue. All in all a cool looking pedal that demands the extra space on your pedal board.

Sounds

Although tagged as a “recto in a box” style pedal, I`ve noticed that the triple wreck is much more verstatile that you might think. The box is capable of dialling in a whole bunch of vintage and modern distortions, from bluesy crunch, right up to thrash, hardcore, punk and and derivative of metal.
One great element of dialling a sound is that the controls are very sensitive and seem to have great effect in tone shaping when compared to many other pedals I`ve used. Also, it seems that if run into a clean amp, it`s very hard to actually get a bad tone out of it (have a listen to the youtube soundcheck for examples).

My main reason for buying the TW was the lack of decent distortions out there that would provide a fat, full on gain tone but retain definition. Within a minute I’d found that tone (and many more) on the TW. Fat, chunky lip smacking gain. The TW basically makes a joke of many high gain boxes I’ve had (including the best so far, the Blackstar DistX which is good, but takes ages finding a good tone). So all in all, the high and low gain tones from the pedal are amazing, highly musical plenty of dynamics and definition……a Boss MT-2 this is definately not.

The booster on the pedal works in conjunction with the Cream\Crunch switch, so when boosted, it fattens the tone but also adds a slight element of crunch, or gets much smoother and heads into fuzztone territory. I`m not a fan of fuzz, but during the soundcheck I stumbled on another secret weapon of the TW. Boosting the pedal with the Cream/Crunch at about 9 o clock gets you into perfect Smashing Pumpkins territory, infact the closest I`ve heard from just a pedal.
Truly amazing.

Overall

In summary, keywords for this pedal are, Fat, Defined, Rockin and truly great. So much so, I really really want to try the Wampler Pinnacle 2 and the Super Plextortion, which, if they are half as good as the Triple Wreck, will be amazing pedals.

Score 9.7 best distortion box I’ve EVER used in 17 years of playing!