Morley wah - finally mods for ultimate wah tone

[marino]

Hello everyone!

This is for all of you who think your morley doesnt really whawhawah and is far from crybaby/vox taype of wah. I was looking for right mods for a long time and this is what I came up with.
All of these mods are for classic wah, pro series wah and possibly for pro series II.

minor mods:
1) parallel with R1-100K 0,001uF for more treble content.experiment with cap value.

2) experiment with c2-0.0047uF. make it higher for bassier wah.   I leave it original for time being.

3) if you have TL072 inside you probably have buffered version.
   I dont so I made a simple FET buffer and put it infront. it looks messy on the board and I had to cut some traces and do minor solder work. This is just for better bypass, it doesnt really do anything to wah sound. BUT I make the bypass/wah split-point before, not after the buffer. ( look at the schematic on morley site) Why? because I dont want buffer in bypass cause I have fuzzface after morley and fuzz works best unbuffered. for me at least.

now major and must-do mods:

1)Find R6-470K in feedback loop. make parallel with this one 330K and put a simple on/off switch in series with 330K. This is clean/dirty switch. Dirty is original resistor. This is good with distortion after wah but unusable for cleans. This was my major complain for Morley wah. no clean sounds in it. When switch on you have lower resistance for great clean sound and a bit lower volume. This clean resambles somewhat crybaby wah.

2)Find R28-4.7K near LED/LDR. Remove it and put a 3K to 5K pot instead and solder a 2.2K on one lug so that on zero setting there remains 2.2K between LED and 9V supply. with this pot you control range. No need to bend LED and LDR. You control LED brightness and go from subtle midrangey wah to powerful trebly wah, again more like crybaby. Notice that lower resistance make LED brighter and wah has more treble response what again was lacking in original pedal.

I didnt try to change IC, I am very sattisfied now. You still have original pedal with switch at dirty and range pot somewhere in between. But you also get great clean funky wah. switch to dirty and make wah as powerful as you want with range pot. With these I have the ultimate wah tone in a pedal. Not exactly a
vox but much closer than original morley. Plus no need to ever change "the pot" like in crybaby or vox.

Hope you will like it too!

Enjoy!

Marin

[modsquad]

Holy crap...I hated my Morley Pro Series II that I was fixin to gut it and canabalize the parts, then I found this post on mods.  So I said what the heck I'll try it.  In 30 minutes I had a totally new WAH.  I love the versatility.  The switch allows you to flip from using it with a relatively clean signal.  Switch it and it set it for a dirty tone with distortion.  The other mod of having a pot to adjust the LED in front of the LDR allows you to control the bassiness or trebliness of the sound.

OMG what a cool set of mods.

Stan

[Paul Marossy]

Cool, thanks for sharing that. Not too many people seem to be very excited about the Morley wahs. Sounds like this could chnage some people's minds. 

[axg20202]

Nice mod info this. Yes, it's an old thread, but I stumbled across it and implemented both of the 'must-do' mods suggested by the OP - did them to a Classic Wah. The numbering of the resistor going to the wah LED isn't the same on my pedal, but it was obvious which one to swap out with the pot. For the 330k resistor mod I used a DPDT switch here so that I could have an LED to show when the switch was engaged. In fact, the circuit board has a ready made mounting for a second indicator LED. All you have to do is drill a hole in the top of the case in the same relative position as the original 'wah' indicator LED (but on the other side of the pedal) and solder the LED straight onto the 'lug' on the board after drilling a couple of holes in the board to pass the leads through - simple.

I still have to try the mods out fully in my setup but they are definitely worth doing, particularly the wah LED brightness pot mod, which is great. The switch mod is less important IMHO but being able to tweak the tone of the wah without having to open her up and fiddle with the LED and LDR position is great.