V847 Wah w/ Vintage Gibson Low Impedance PUs

[Primus]

So I bought this 1971 Gibson Les Paul recording Friday and I love it. It's my favorite guitar in the world. Thing about the recording is it uses low impedance PUs for a direct in to the soundboard, but has a built in passive amp to get the signal up to guitar amp input levels.

So anyway, that is the weird quirk of the guitar. The problem I ran into is that my wah is quitting on me. I can stomp it on, and can hear just a very slight wah sound from it. If I roll back the trimpot on the Q resistor I added, the slight wah will reduce to nothing as the inductor is bypassed.

I have heard of issues with wahs that precede a fuzz face not working. What about wahs that follow a les paul recording?

A further problem is I seem to remember the pedal working friday night, albeit badly. So did I kill something in my wah or what? I don't see how I could have friend the thing or what component I could have fried.

[Chris R]

if its some sort of impedence issue.. than you should be able to put some type of non true-bypassed pedal between the guitar and wah and that would fix it right up.  The pedal dosn't have to be on.. it just has to be there for the buffering.  (TS-9, or any boss pedal)

try it out.

C

[phillip]

Chris brings up a really good point.  The Boss and Ibanez pedals like the SD-1, DS-1, OD-3, TS-9, etc. make great buffer boxes when they're not on because of their JFET electronic switching.  Even when the pedal is "off" the signal is still being fed through a pair of buffers with a reasonably high input impedance and a low output impedance.  

This trick works great if you have a wah pedal and don't want to add an output buffer to it (if you have a vintage unit that has the potential of being worth a fair amount of money), and you also want to use a Fuzz Face or ToneBender after it in your effects chain.

Phillip