Tech 21 Double Drive x3

Conceptually simple but this pedal has so much range, it can be hard to get used to at first. Not as bad as other reviews have said either.

Volume, treble, mid, bass, classA drive, class B drive. Unlike most overdrives (fulltone OCD for example) this pedal needs very little gain on the drive controls. Then tweak the active EQ to dial in the sound. I have A/Bed one Ddrive setting against my mesa stilettos hot channel and they are comparable when dialed in properly. Can also get the VOX and Bassman sounds as well. It has a tight low bass and a cruchy top end. It works for me.

SOLID

Haven't called. I called Tech 21 a few years ago just to ask questions on a product and they were very nice and quite helpful. I gave them a 9 because my call had nothing to do with this pedal

Rock, blues, alt, country...and a little jazz. This dials in the rock/blues tones just fine. I like that this pedal does not color the over all sound of the guitar and amp. Once I figured out how to dial it in I started to love it. Now it has a home on my pedalboard.

But if you need an overdrive with instand gratification I suggest that you try before you buy. If you want a multisound overdriveIf you like to dial in an exact sound, this pedal is worth an audition.

Easy to USE .... NOT easy to find good sounds (for me). The biggest problem i had with this unit .... and this goes for ANY stomp pedal .... you shouldn't have to battle with the pedal to find good, usable sounds. A good pedal will pretty much jump out right away and reveal its character...... a player will just "know" if it works for him. In contrast, it's understandable .... and acceptable .... to have to 'work' with amp's, processors, and the like, to achieve the sounds you need. But a PEDAL .... i don't care if it's a traditional design, or a "multi-switch"/channel selector design, or whatever .... if a pedal's not giving you what you need, it ain't worth your time & money. IMHO.

With alot of time, i was able to find a fairly narrow range of okay-to-decent tones. The main problem for me, soundwise, was that the Gain pots produced more harsh than usable distortion. I have several other pedals - including Tech 21's own EXCELLENT Character Series pedals - that give me the tones i want. It just wasn't worth my time to battle with this pedal to find usable tones. (Luckily, i picked up this unit off eBay for a huge discount, so it wasn't hard to recoup my purchase.)

The build quality seemed good. The foot switches were very smooth-operating. The pots were good quality.

Tech 21 is generally quite responsive to e-mails, and their commentary is useful. They even sent me a tee-shirt after i sent them a glowing e-mail praising their Character-Series pedals :-) ! (Quite cute.)

I rate this particular pedal LOW. ALTHOUGH, from what i've read, and heard, their ORIGINAL Double-Drive pedal (the "single-channel" version) was GOOD. Apparently whatever they did to come up with this multi-switch version, they pretty much botched-up.

I rate Tech 21 themselves HIGH -

Made-In-USA; good product build quality and compotnents (i own a PSA 1.1 preamp that's a juicy hum-dinger .... along with all four of their Character Series guitar pedals, which are truly amps-in-a-box); clearly-committed company & personnel to their product line & playing community.

AND, Tech 21 was founded by a person with a "vision" .... an expert player who also possesses design and build expertise, who was able to bring his vision to the world. In this day and age, THAT is truly virtuous.

Fairly easy to edit, but you must keep in mind that the knobs are sensitive and gain an understanding of how all knobs work together (Drive A, A/B, tone controls, level). After that, editing patches is easy, but that's about where the fun stops.

Unfortunately, I was only to able to get 2 tones that worked being crunch and mild distortion, but the solo tone wasn't there. It gets fizzy, muddy, and harsh very fast, and unless you need a clean boost (I don't) and maybe two types of crunch to medium gain, it didn't sound nearly as good as I hoped. I used a Keeley modded tube screamer as reference and was able to dial in a reasonable facsimile of that for crunch, but higher gain settings either were too noisy or just muddy and not articulate. I have a VERY expensive pedal board with 90%+ boutique or modded pedals including a Tech 21 Double Drive original version which is the shizznit, and the DD3x was a total let down. Not trusting my own opinion, I lent it to my other guitarist (also a gear head) and his opinion was that it basically had 2 workable settings. Also, be forewarned that the volume level jumps ALL OVER THE PLACE as the channels cascade, which nearly makes channel 3 unusable. Only giving it a 6 here.

Tech 21 - It will take a beating and last.

Awesome. They'll answer your emails within a few days and help you out.

Of all the boutique and modded pedals I've used in the last few years, this was the biggest let down. I really wanted a pedal that would give me a crunch, distortion, and solo tone but no dice. You get clean boost, crunch, and fizzy harsh or muddy distortion. I've been playing over 30 years, gig at least 3 times a month for HOURS (3 sets @75 minutes each), have played just about every form of Rock, Blues, Pop, Americana, Motown, and have dabbled in light jazz, country, classical, etc. Lots of stage experience and tend to only use high-end gear from vintage guitars to expensive cables, to cool amps (Dr Z, Bogner, Boogie, Marshall, you name it). Compared to the original single channel DD which I have permanently mounted on my pedal board, this is a 6 tops.

*** The only caveat is that if you get one cheap try it for yourself, but don't bother paying top dollar for it. Giving it a 6 because it had two workable channels and the resale wasn't bad.

*** I highly recommend the Tech 21 Double Drive original version. Get one used (no longer made), dial it up for distortion, drop a good overdrive in front and use that for your crunch, and when you combine the OD and original DD OMG the singing solo tones are amazing!!! But don't try this with DD3x because it's a different animal altogether

As stated before, this pedal is more difficult to use than a plain distortion/overdrive pedal. This comes mainly from the fact that one has to mix both drive A and drive A/B in order to get a decent result.
Furthermore, every knob is VERY responsive.
Editing patches is very easy (once you are happy with the settings!!!): you just have to doubleclick on one of the three footswitches.
Manual is short and well written, it is easy to understand even for me whose natural tongue is not English.
the sample settings at the end of the manual is a perfect way to start programming the channels.

This is where the double drive X3 shines out.
I have been experiencing gear for a good decadeand a half, tried all the Boss pedals and multieffects, played on Rocktron Prophesy, Line6 floorboards, Vox tonelab, etc etc...
Currently my gear is:
all kind of Gibsons with humbuckers (Historic 59 LP, Ace Frehley custom LP, class 5 LP, Korina explorer, flying Vee), McNaught Phoenix with Rio Grande BBQ, Jackson RR1, PRS singlecut AP, PRS Archtop, Vigier excalibur with active EMGs.
My main pedal is a Carl Martin Quattro (great for crunches).
In order to get a decent high gain distortion/overdrive I am using a variety of pedals: Visual Sound Jekkyl and Hyde (first edition and third edition) and Double drive (great green colour!!!). I am also using a Blackstar HT-distX (pure valve filth).
All this goes in the return of a Mesa Boogie Lonestar special linked to a 4x10 Mesa , which is more than enough for my studio, or any small gig. (I used to play on a Roadking head but decided to sell it one day where my back hurt too much...)
So the double drive 3X allows me to dial in the exact overdrive/distortion I am after, the equalisation is very efficient, and the A, A/B cascade provides every sound from light crunch to mind blowing distortion.
Tech21 give anew dimension to flexibility with the double drive 3X.
What I really like about this pedal is that the sound remains very "clear" despite a large amount of distortion, and that every note stays well defined.
Compared to this pedal, the legendary Jekkyl and Hyde (which has been my benchmark ODS pedal for years) sounds dark and muddy!!!!!
I am definitely enthousiastic about this pedal as you might have noticed.

pedal is solid, knobs one is not supposed to step on, and footswitches are bigger than on most other pedals.
On a personal note, the blue colour looks a bit cheesy to me, but once again this is personal... :)

I am playing blues, classic rock and som heavy metal compos.
Therefore my needs vary a lot from light crunches to all kind of distortions/overdirves.
After long years of playing and testing, I am very happy with my actual settings, and not afraid to say that the Tech21 double drive 3X has been a real upgrade to my sound.
I recommend anyone interested to purchase this pedal to listen to the sound samples provided by the Tech21 website, this is what convinced me to purchase this pedal and I was all but disappointed!!!

compared to an old muli-effects unit with two line display and 20 sub menus it's very easy. Compared to most distortion pedals it's very difficult and you must spend a long time refining your patch because the unit if very flexible and the controls a quite interactive.

I will give this a 10 because I feel the other 2 reviews are entirely too hard on this pedal.

The pedal does have a very large variety of sounds before all out distortion but it relies on very conservative placement of both the the a and a/b knobs. The best tones combine both drives and you have to go back and forth turning one up and the other down while readjusting the EQ. It can be time consuming to find the tone you are looking for but it's worth it in the end.

I get a good crunch rhythm sound using the neck pickup on my les paul special by setting the A drive to almost nothing and the A/B drive to about 8 o'clock. Don't be afraid to set the drive contols very low and try mixing them with more of one or the other, that is the key to getting a decent crunch tone. This pedal has way more gain than you will ever need, but that doesn't mean you have to use it.

This pedal seems to like P-90's and Humbuckers and I would suggest it for Gibson players mostly.

This is a killer pedal that can store 3 presets but is all analog. How cool is that. Pretty cool if you ask me. I find it much more usefull than the TRI-AC because it doesn't have the speaker emulation of the "fizz" that plagues that pedal.

This took me a day to get used to the knobs being preset and not what they appear by the position of the knobs. For this reason I set all the knobs at 0 or 7:00 after adjusting and programming the channel I'm working on. I did one gig with and took it off my board the next day.
I admit I like things simple. I also like to see the parameters of each knob as I play making mental tone notes if you will.

First let me say I love my red Double Drive. I like that it dosn't clean up well with the Vol. knob. I like the EQ curve of the tone knob. I don't mind the engine room noise when the gains are up. I like the way it takes my OCD ver.2 up the wazoo.

The new DD3X has more gain than the DD. More noise, probably due to the active 3 band EQ. I found most of my patches had the treble knob at 9:00 or less. And I play a Fender HRDX (regarded as a dark amp by many) in the clean channel with the bright switch off. I had a very hard time with this pedal balancing the EQ.

The original DD has a great sweet spot in the tone knob (from 2 - 4:00) I could not find that feel anywhere in this pedal.

If all you want is three programmed clean boosts and you have plenty of pedal space you might like it. The EQ works ok for shaping clean tones. I tried to get a light and edgy od like the OCD with the gain at 9:00 but no dice. Medium and high gain stuff just didn't sound very pleasing. I did own a GT-2 before and thought it was too sterile and processed sounding. just for reference.

It is very well made in the USA. I like the silent switching
and the bypass circuit.

The all analog progamming is amazing. the way the knobs show you where they are preset by the blinking channel LED is genius.
I love tech 21's double drive and original Sansamp.

This will not stay with me . I like it simple and useable with inspiring tones. None of that here. I won't trash it in any catergories as it might work well for someone else.

It's very easy to use. Similar to Tri AC, it's very simple to store sounds.

This is very difficult to evaluate. You can get a very good clean sound (or clean boost). It doesn't change your amp's voice. You can also get a very good distortion sound. And I mean one sound, not many good sounds. The Class AB is good, class A might be good for country etc. but I don't care about the class A sounds this box offers. They are way too muddy IMHO. And class AB only sounds good when you add quite much distortion. And even then it's not a metal sound, but really good for hard rock. What you can't get is a decent "in-between" sound. It's just bad, not natural at all. And I hate it. I would have wanted to like this pedal, because I love the Tri AC. But this is very different compared to Tri AC. I just love Tri AC's Marshall sounds (which aren't really similar to real Marshall tones). They are very, very good and a pleasure to play, but DDx3 differs so much, I can't stand it.

Tech 21 is always reliable.

Haven't needed this, but I've heard they are very helpful at Tech 21.

If you only need a clean and a distorted sound, then this is the way to go. Otherwise I wouldn't buy this. I was very disappointed with this product, since I love my Tri AC and also have a SansAmp Original, which is very good, too. This thing was also very expensive (like all American products in Europe) which makes me even more disapponted.