Cry Baby Wah
Episode Transcript
Senior year of high school, I bought a Jimi Hendrix greatest hits CD, and like probably everyone after their first time listening to Jimi Hendrix, my little mind was blown. Around the same time, I got my first guitar – in my case, a Starfield Altair SJ Classic II – and like probably everyone after getting their first guitar, I started trying to learn Hendrix songs. And like probably everyone after getting their first guitar, I started buying effect pedals. My first one was inspired by Jimi Hendrix and that CD: I bought a wah-wah pedal.
My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds. I’m going to focus on some historically important ones for this project.
For the uninitiated, an effect pedal is usually a small box, with some electronics that modify the sound of a musical instrument like an electric guitar. But beyond all that, effect pedals open up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.
The first modern wah pedal was built in 1966, but the idea surfaced years earlier. Country music legend Chet Atkins was said to have used a similar device in the 1950s that he designed himself. The concept itself was not new even then. Brass players moving a mute in and out of the bell of a trumpet or trombone to create a crying wah sound is known back to the 1920s at least.
Most accounts credit the Thomas Organ Company with building the first wah pedal as we know it, and it was an accident. Electronics engineers there trying to build a cheaper version of the Vox Super Beatle amplifier stumbled on the wah sounds during testing. Soon the effect was combined with an organ’s expression pedal, and guitarists like Eric Clapton and Frank Zappa added them to their arsenal. It was Zappa that turned Jimi Hendrix on to the wah pedal.
The wah pedal also found its way into funk music, creating the wacka-wacka sound heard all over the 1970s, in numerous funk records and film soundtracks. That bow chicka wow wow thing?
You know what it is. See, what it is...is the sound of a wah pedal.
The physics of guitar tone are the same no matter what equipment you have. Take an electric guitar. You make metal strings vibrate, these vibrations are transformed into electrical signals, and these signals are turned into sound vibrations by an amplifier. That’s a one-sentence summary of the physics of it. But the great guitar players? What they do is less a process of physics, and more a process of alchemy. Jimi Hendrix was the greatest of alchemists: he made the greatest gold from metal and wood.
A critical part of his alchemy was the wah-wah pedal. He used a number of Vox wah pedals, which you can hear in action on many of his classic songs. Listen to the intro to “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and you will really notice the effect.
Think of a wah pedal like a gas pedal: Step down on it all the way, it becomes a high-pass filter, which allows treble or high frequencies to pass through and filters out the bass or low frequencies. Ease up on the pedal, and it does the opposite: it acts as a low-pass filter. The fun thing about the wah pedal is that you can easily rock forward and back, creating what’s called a spectral glide. Oooh! The end result is the signature “crying” sound or wah.
My first ever effect pedal was a Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal. It was about 80 dollars, and I bought it at a musical instrument shop that doesn’t exist anymore. My early attempts back then to recreate the Hendrix sound with that wah pedal, my Starfield guitar, and my cheap little 10 watt Park amplifier were modest but oh so fun. I still have that first wah pedal. A few years later, I bought another one: a Danelectro Dan-O-Wah, also fun and notable because it’s shaped like an old Cadillac, has 60s and 70s wah effects, and includes distortion and an octaver.
A big reason I even started playing guitar in the first place was to recreate the sounds that I was hearing in my favorite songs. I’m no alchemist, but my modest successes in recreating those sounds still keep me coming back, all these years later.
For a t-shirt or an art print featuring the Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal, visit EffectPedalProject.com. Want to hear more songs that have a wah pedal in them? Check out the playlist on Spotify or in the show notes for this episode at the Effect Pedal website.
Effect Pedal is a MeteorWright production, hosted and produced by me, Wright Seneres. If you like what you heard here, subscribe to the podcast and consider getting the Effect Pedal email newsletter in your inbox. The newsletter has extra fun content for this episode, including links, videos, and other cool stuff related to wah pedals curated by me. For even more fun content, Effect Pedal is on social media too at @EffectPedal. You can find links to all of that at EffectPedalProject.com. Theme music is “Lucky Day” by the Meritocracy. Special thanks to Alice Seneres and Tony Whalen.
Thank you for listening to Effect Pedal. What’s your effect?
Tune in to Effect Pedal next week, in which I convince you that the Carpenters, yes the Carpenters, were cooler than you remember.
Gear used in this episode
Starfield Altair SJ Classic II (1993, made in Korea) and Fender Stratocaster (2009, made in Mexico), Dunlop Original Cry Baby Wah Model GCB-95 (1993), Danelectro Dan-O-Wah, Dolamo “Green Vintage” Overdrive, into Fender Princeton Chorus amplifier (mid-2000s, solid state version) and Park G10 amplifier (1993, made in Korea)
