Empress Heavy Menace

The Empress Heavy Menace is a high-gain distortion pedal from Empress Effects, an evolution of the company's original full-size Heavy in a smaller, pedalboard-friendly enclosure¹²³. Empress describes it as covering any high-gain tone from crunch to crushing, with a three-band EQ, a footswitchable adaptive noise gate and a key input for triggering that gate from a separate signal⁴. It shipped from May 2023 at $249.00 USD⁴¹.

What sets the Heavy Menace apart from most compact distortions is the gate. Envelope followers in the circuit respond to your playing, letting sustained notes decay naturally but clamping down quickly during fast stops⁴. On Sweetwater's demo, Nick Bowcott put it this way:

The controls: Gain, Weight, Output, EQ and Gate

The Heavy Menace carries two footswitches: one for bypass of the drive sound and one to kick the gate in and out³. The knob set breaks down like this⁴⁸⁹:

The Weight control is the one players coming from other high-gain pedals will notice. Empress says turning it up gives a thick, full sound, while turning it counterclockwise gives a tight response suited to palm muting and extended-range guitars⁴. Delicious Audio called the result "a pedal that might win the contest for 'most tweakable distortion pedal in a compact case'"².

Lite(ish), Heavy and Heavier modes

The three-position Channel switch selects between three voicings¹:

• Lite(ish): a lower-gain option for a more classic crunch. Delicious Audio describes it as slightly less heavy tones perfect for old-style hard rock and classic rock², and Pete Thorn noted it lets you get into a lower gain range, more like crunch³.
• Heavy and Heavier: the two voicings carried over from the original Heavy pedal, aimed at extreme saturation. Guitar World described them as working their way up the gain scale, promising searing modern metal sounds⁸, and Delicious Audio called them suitable for genres flirting with extreme distortion².

The original Heavy offered just the two channels, Heavy and Heavier⁶, so Lite(ish) is the new ground the Menace covers.

The noise gate, key input and bypass modes

The gate is footswitchable, with a threshold knob to set where it engages⁴¹⁰. Two bypass modes change how it behaves⁴:

• Normal bypass mode: the gate doesn't affect the signal if the distortion is off⁴.
• Independent bypass mode: Empress says this is like having separate distortion and gate pedals, so the gate can stay active on its own⁴.

The key input is the other gate feature worth knowing. It lets you trigger the gate from an external signal rather than the main input³. On Premier Guitar's demo, Zach Wish explained the use case:

Empress says this allows consistent gate operation regardless of changes at the main input, such as stacking pedals earlier in the signal chain¹. Delicious Audio notes it is particularly useful with pedals placed before the Heavy Menace, such as a low-gain pedal for stacking, and that splitting a clean signal with a pedal like the Empress Buffer+ keeps the gate behaving consistently².

For bypass itself, the pedal offers true bypass for maximum transparency, or buffered bypass to protect against signal loss over long cable runs⁴².

Power: 9V, 250mA

The Heavy Menace runs on a 9V DC center-negative supply through a 2.1mm barrel connector and does not run off a battery⁴⁵. It requires 250mA⁴, which is more than many compact analog distortions draw and rules out sharing a low-current daisy-chain output. The original Heavy drew approximately 200mA on the same 9V DC negative-tip supply¹¹.

Heavy versus Heavy Menace

The Heavy Menace is an evolution of the original Heavy with new features and a compact enclosure⁴. Pete Thorn, who demoed both, described the Menace as the compact version: "I did a video for the original version this pedal was a bigger pedal"³. The differences that matter to a player:

The Limited Edition

Empress also offers a Heavy Menace Limited Edition, listed at $249.00 USD¹². It shares the standard pedal's enclosure height of 1.5" and 1lb weight¹².

What reviewers said

Reception was largely positive. Premier Guitar's 2024 high-gain roundup described the pedal as "loaded with an immensely powerful 3-band EQ with a sweepable mid control, footswitchable noise gate, a low-end sculpting control, and three different distortion modes"¹⁴. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson was more measured in his 2023 review, calling it "a decent pedal as all Empress releases typically are," noting he liked it and kept it in his reference collection but could not endorse it overall¹⁵. Empress lists Chris Wrate among the artists who use the Heavy Menace⁴; on his Empress artist page he calls it "an absolute beast of a pedal and can take any amp to a level you'd never think it could achieve"¹⁶.

On Premier Guitar's demo, Zach Wish ran the pedal through a 1968 Fender Bandmaster set clean with a Fender Jazzmaster HH and a Gretsch G5260 Electromatic Jet Baritone, noting the $249 price⁷.

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