Cry Baby wah mod?!?!

[joegagan]

jimi,  good to hear your experience. i agree.

[pinkjimiphoton]

thanks joe. to me, fuzz needs to be before wah ....at least fuzzfaces do.

[joegagan]

exactly. even back in my TS days, the dirt was before wah.

i have an exception, for a while in the mid 2000s, i had a big pedal board. i had fuzzes all over the place, before/ after wah etc etc. it was fun.

[fpaul]

Not trying to start a war, but just to report...

I added an output buffer to my thomas organ crybaby and my fuzzface clone worked after the wah.  It didn't work before adding the buffer.

I did this at the same time I added true bypass to stop the tone sucking, which also worked.  

[joegagan]

true, fpaul, a regular FF will not work well with the output of a standard wah. i was talking about an input pot to regulate the gain of a fuzzface as in easyface, fulltone 69, etc. jim was alos referring to an input resistor, which is the essentially doing the same thing.

the other upside of the input gain control is that it gives the fuzzface a wider range of usable gain tones. the downside is that the makeup of the pot can sometimes add hiss at lower gain settings. plastic conductive pots  remedy this, in most cases.

[pinkjimiphoton]

what seemed to work best for me was to put i think it was a 50k pot in with a dpdt switch (for in or out of circuit) between the output of the wah board and the footswitch.
i never bothered to remove the input buffer on mine and make it TB, after modding it it actually had a bit of a gain boost when engaged that i liked.
the simple resistance (i think it was joe that hipped me to it) seemed to work best...i have a box full of buffer daughterboards i tried, everything from simple transistor to jfet to opamp, and the stupid pot worked best. could kinda dial in the sweet spot where the fuzzface and crybaby worked well together..and then abandoned it when i realized i STILL preferred the ff first, like i did when i was younger...i fell for the hype and general consensus that wah should be first,  and did that for probably 12-15 years by rote until i re-did it and found i preferred it the other way.
i DO prefer the wah before overdrive...but not before fuzz...they seem to neuter each other if the wah is first. the pot helps, but not enough to make me change the orfer of the pedals. that's also why i put the switch on it, so if i NEED the series resistance (which i assume works because it changes the output from a voltage to a current? bear with me, newb here, and a hack at best) i can turn it on, or bypass it if i don't.

much happier tonally this way...and if i have the ff tonebender, wah and klon on all at once, i can just play the pedals, which i LIKE.

heck, i can turn the guitar OFF and it sounds like hendrix trippin' baalz!

(not that i am fit to even shine the man's shoes)

[fpaul]

I built a GGG 69 fuzzface with input gain control but I've never tried it with the wah.  Sounds like I need to try it.

I don't use my wah much because it's the only thing on my board that uses a battery, and I always forget to unplug it and kill the battery.  I do the same thing with my active bass, to the point where I'd like to change the pickups to passive.  You'd think I would learn....