Anasounds/Third Man Hardware La Grotte review – Jack White brings real spring reverb to your pedalboard
$299/£300, thirdmanstore.com
Jack White loves a bit of spring reverb. And frankly who doesn’t? The sound of springs oscillating your signal in a little metal tank is one of the foundational aspects of electric guitar. So much so that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern amp or modern reverb pedal that doesn’t seek to emulate that sound in some fashion or another.
READ MORE: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient review – is this the best budget reverb pedal on the market?
Increasingly though, that spring sound is not being made with actual springs. Many of us are choosing to get our reverb from pedals, and even those of us who want to get our reverb on the backline side are finding that fewer amps are shipping with the telltale metal box that denotes a bona fide spring reverb tank.
Into this comes Jack White – a man who seems permanently stuck in a push and pull between old and new. On the one hand he’s one of the great modern innovators of electric guitar, who has embraced new technologies and guitar innovations to create some of the most exciting and influential music of our times. On the other, he’s the guy who owns a direct-to-vinyl recording booth, and painstakingly customised his new Ford Bronco truck so it was as close to his 1975 Ford Bronco truck as is humanly possible.
His new reverb pedal reflects both sides of his personality. La Grotte is a partnership with French effects brand Anasounds that reflects the pedal-first existence of most modern guitarists (himself included) but flips it by putting an actual honest-to-goodness spring reverb tank right there at your feet. Is it mad? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing…
Image: Adam Gasson
What is the Jack White La Grotte reverb pedal?
La Grotte literally means, ‘the cave’ and scratches a long-time itch for Jack White – the ability to have a compact fully mechanical spring reverb pedal on his pedalboard, that he could use with any amp he happened to feel like using that day.
The partnership with Anasounds isn’t coincidental of course – the French brand made its name by devising a way to put real spring reverb on your pedalboard in a compact way. However, an important difference exists between La Grotte and previous Anasounds pedal-reverb efforts. Previously, Anasounds spring reverbs came in two parts – a small pedal with switching and controls, and a tiny outboard reverb tank designed to be mounted safe and sound underneath your board or on your amp.
La Grotte dispenses with this, combining both controls and tank into one enclosure. If the hassle of having to find somewhere to stash the tank has put you off an Anasounds pedal before, this is of course big news. It’s also pretty big full stop – sporting a chunky enclosure that’s a little under 5×6” big, and about an inch and a half deep. If you can’t be bothered to get a tape measure out, it’s almost exactly the same size as two Boss compact pedals side by side.
As with other Anasounds products, the springs are right there behind a little transparent screen that lights up when you plug it in – after all, what’s the point in having real springs if nobody can see them doing their good work?
The pedal’s available in two different finish options – both black and yellow of course – and the one I’ve got on test here is the limited edition White Stripes-y swirl finish, which is a Third Man Records exclusive (and will cost you an extra $50).
Image: Adam Gasson
Does the Anasounds La Grotte sound good?
You expect to know what you’re in for when you plug into a spring reverb, and the interesting thing about La Grotte is that it does a very good job of confounding those expectations. For starters, I didn’t expect it to be quite as versatile and interesting as it turns out to be on initial inspection.
It only has four controls, but they’re typically carefully considered by White. The ‘Dry’ knob for example doesn’t just determine the level of dry signal, but also the level of an internal preamp, while there’s a two-band EQ for the reverb itself, allowing you to emphasise the amount of high or low frequencies that resonate.
With the Dry and Wet knobs set at around 9 o’clock and the EQs at 12 o’clock, you get a very pleasing and classic spring reverb sound that is pretty remarkable. It’s reductive and cliche to say ‘real thing sounds better than digital thing’ but even on this most polite and vintage setting, the depth and lushness of the sound is so much more alive and vibrant than your bog standard digital spring setting.
Image: Adam Gasson
But this is a pedal that’s definitely not about politeness. This becomes instantly apparent as you turn up the dry control and introduce more of that preamp. While you can tweak the level of gain it adds with an internal trim pot, out of the gate it’s set so that as you wind the knob up, things quickly get very raw and raunchy, with a massive amount of level boost going with it. It quickly makes even the cleanest amps sound dirty, and will tip even mildly overdriven sounds positively filthy – albeit still retaining an impressive degree of clarity even with the control full up. It’s loud with it, mind you.
The Wet knob is another slightly misleading control, but a hugely powerful and musical one. In addition to level, the wet control also adds gain, but just to the reverbed sound – and this is where things start to really get interesting.
Combined with the high and low EQ controls, this allows you to take the basic spring reverb sound and push things in much more esoteric and atmospheric situations. With the Wet full up and the low frequencies emphasised, I’m able to create gloriously dense self-oscillating soundscapes in an instant.
As an expressive esoteric reverb it’s pretty much as weird and atmospheric as a genuine spring sound could possibly get. It even does the thing where the springs jangle in the tank when you give the pedal itself a whack. This is something that has definite soundscapey potential in the right hands, but I mainly kept doing it by accident – especially as the springs jangle even with the pedal bypassed. Candidly, it’s not the sort of thing you want to have happening by accident, and I found I was knocking it rather a lot over the course of my test.
Should I buy an Anasounds La Grotte?
There’s some interesting stuff going on with this pedal, not least in what it’s capable of versus what its creator clearly intends it to be used for. You absolutely can get one of the most vibrant and organic classic spring reverb sounds you’ll ever hear in a pedal with the right settings, but that rather feels like using a Ferrari to deliver for UberEats.
White and Anasounds main man Alexander Ernandez have created a pedal that’s crying out for you to get weird, to get loose, to make strange noises and wonderful howls. If you’re going to spend $300 on a reverb pedal, you’d best make the most of it.
Anasounds/TMR La Grotte alternatives
There aren’t many spring reverb pedals out there that use actual springs in them. The most compact option is Anasounds’ own Element Spring Reverb (€349) which puts the spring in a clever little outboard tank that you can mount underneath your board of choice. If space isn’t a concern then the Surfy Industries Surfybear Compact ($375) features an Accutronics type-8 spring reverb pan, while the Carl Martin Headroom ($280) is a similarly impressive real spring reverb.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
