participate in the wah pot listening test if you would please.

[joegagan]

assessing different pot types for an upcoming bulk order.

for a controlled experiment, i tried 5 different pots in the exact same wah, a very nice sounding stock mid 90s dunlop unit.

i did 5 videos in a short time. same amp, guitar, pickup. all settings the the same, tried to play same licks same way. same cam location.

sorry the audio quality is just my fuji cam. if you want to play, see if you can hear differences in the tones. i hear them, but i think a lot of it has to do with overall R value, ( they ranged from 90k to 115k, i kept track.)

best way i have found to compare is to open all 5 vids in separate tabs so you can toggle back and forth using the pause button on each.

will let you know what each pot was after you listen.

it was a mix of carbon , some plastic. a mix of gear ratios also to optimize and compare.

after 10 to 20 responses or so i will reveal what the pots were.

let's have fun out there people!

[joegagan]

1.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5SVwGqDIpo

2.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1V93fuI-s

3.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsGxS6qEc94

4.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVyTCimivJM

5.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ssg8AZTTIQ

[Tony Forestiere]

Not a big wah user, but: I preferred 1 and 4.
1 was kind of "throaty" to me, and 4 seemed to have a certain bit of extra "quack".
What do I know

[Jered]

   I like 1

[armdnrdy]

My personal preferences are 1, 4, and 5.

2 & 3 sounded a bit too toe trebly. But...you're correct...that may just be the resistance.

[kingswayguitar]

#2
pretty close
pretty cool

[Devius]

I liked 1. Seemed to have the nicest sweep, balanced over the whole range.

[joegagan]

thanks for the replies so far, guys.

a little hint, a peek under the skirt - # 4 was rev taper from 'normal' - a mistake by the supplier. i threw it in to evaluate. some of you detected/commented on the rev emphasis.

[Keppy]

I liked #3 the best. It seemed to change pretty abruptly between the two parts of the sweep I like best, cutting out some of the harsh in-between.

#5 sounded very smooth & sweet to my ear.

#2 Had a lot of treble clarity.

#1 & 4 sounded pretty dead to me. I didn't care for them, pretty much for the same reason others liked them.

Disclaimer: laptop speakers

[joegagan]

thanks to all who have responded. going to take another listen.

[Paul Marossy]

thanks for the replies so far, guys.

a little hint, a peek under the skirt - # 4 was rev taper from 'normal' - a mistake by the supplier. i threw it in to evaluate. some of you detected/commented on the rev emphasis.

I like the rev log pot in wahs. Sounds especially good in my Schaller Bau Wau Yoy Yoy clone.

[joegagan]

^ sounds bad in boomerangs. i bought a nice 68 bg2 with what looked like a correct 68  25k CTS pot, but it was rev log. put the emphasis in a really weird place.

[Mustachio]

Man that's a hard one to judge on my speakers. I think I like 1,2,3 in that order. But It's really hard to say.

So they are different resistance pots and one is a different taper. But Its the same circuit so will it only change the sweep and cross over point ? Do higher resistance pots give more bass or treble by extending the range of resistance that controls the circuit ?

I have modded my vox 847 and a few crybaby's and built a few based on geofex articles. But I don't know them as well as you , all your wahs sound great to me and look even better!

I'm sort of thinking the pots tapper point will be to preference of the player. Some like a smooth sweep from back to front some like that hump in the middle where it changes abruptly. I couldn't totally tell where the cross over point was on the videos I might have to watch em a few more times trying to pay attention to it.

Here's how I play a wah pedal. I mainly use them for leads and will do a few runs in the mid to high end of the tread and then slam it high trebble on those high long grinding notes like the emphasis of a lead so I can stand out over the rest of the band and separate and get that high screaming sound. And when I'm running a fast set of notes as I sweep down or even back up I will rock the tread back and forth to get a wobble effect as I run through fast notes (almost makes it swirling) And for that I like a medium to fast change of tone in the middle section of the pot.

So you might want to find a pot that has the best smooth sweep and one that has the best drastic change in the middle, order half and half, and offer 2 types of wahs depending on what the end user prefers.

Not sure if any of what I said is relevant or if its even worth 2 cents    but I hope it helps.

[brett]

Hi
as far as I could hear, the smooth transition to ringing high-pitched tones from 1 (around 00:09 and 00:10 in the clip) didn't appear from 2 and 3.
The tones from 4 at around 00:16 thru 00:19 sound great to me (pedal almost all the way down?).
thanks for the test

[slacker]

I liked 3 best, seemed to put most of the action in the chewy part of wah sweep which is where I like to play. No doublt the others could do the same if played differently.
The transition from one end to the other on 1 was very nice as well.

[joegagan]

Man that's a hard one to judge on my speakers. I think I like 1,2,3 in that order. But It's really hard to say.

So they are different resistance pots and one is a different taper. But Its the same circuit so will it only change the sweep and cross over point ? Do higher resistance pots give more bass or treble by extending the range of resistance that controls the circuit ?

interesting Q. for a standard tuned wah CB/vox type wah,  there is a sweet spot in R range. 100k being the center point. if you don't change anything else and go down to 50k or up to 500k you lose treble. you move the bias  outside of where it gets full sweep. some of you may recall that the 90s JH dunlop wah had a 470k pot but very little else changed from the standard crybaby. i believe this was their attempt to soften the treble( vintage sounding) without complicating the build process, just spec a different pot. if you put a 100k pot in an early JH wah, it gets brighter. sometime around 10 or 15 years ago, they swithced to a 100k in the JH. dunlop now lists the 100k pot as the replacement pot for all JH wahs regardless of era.

I have modded my vox 847 and a few crybaby's and built a few based on geofex articles. But I don't know them as well as you , all your wahs sound great to me and look even better!

I'm sort of thinking the pots tapper point will be to preference of the player. Some like a smooth sweep from back to front some like that hump in the middle where it changes abruptly. I couldn't totally tell where the cross over point was on the videos I might have to watch em a few more times trying to pay attention to it.

thanks for the compliment, appreciate it.  like you say, it really is personal preference. some players like the fast ramp ( kink) of the hotpotz 1 and 2, which is also the same taper that crybabies had as early as 71. it gives that 'quack' that a lot of people equate to liveliness. the other camp are the slow taper people, who prefer the icar or icar based tapers. this seems to actually affect the way the circuit itself resoanates. since part of the filter involves a cap to ground charging and discharging, there is a time element involved. the fast kink tapers actually pass through certain ranges so quickly they do not allow full charge of cap. you can actually hear this difference in the above test. there actually is a difference in sound between different pot tapers, even with the same R value.

this is even more true in boomerangs. they have a slightly wider physical travel than a CB/vox, and the original modded log taper of the pot measures out almost a perfect linear when measured in the pedal itself. this is evident in how they sound, it is an even sweep with very fine control over the low mids and mids. the boomer also biases the transistors differently which accentuates the charge /discharge rate of the cap to ground effect in my experience.

Here's how I play a wah pedal. I mainly use them for leads and will do a few runs in the mid to high end of the tread and then slam it high trebble on those high long grinding notes like the emphasis of a lead so I can stand out over the rest of the band and separate and get that high screaming sound. And when I'm running a fast set of notes as I sweep down or even back up I will rock the tread back and forth to get a wobble effect as I run through fast notes (almost makes it swirling) And for that I like a medium to fast change of tone in the middle section of the pot.

sounds cool,i would like to hear it!

[digi2t]

Number 1 in on top to my ears, with number 5 a close second. Didn't care for the others. In the end, beauty is in the ears of the beholder. Different folks just have different frequency tastes, and one wah will not rule them all. That's why I have 6 in my arsenal, they just all play different with different gear.

Great shoot out though. My hat's off for the effort.

Cheers,
Dino

[Electron Tornado]

Joe, thanks for taking the time to make the test videos and putting them up for us to hear.


1 and 4 sounded more throaty and maybe more quacky than the others

2 was the smoothest. Not throaty and no real sweet spot some wahs have.

3 and 5 sound similar, though 5 seems to have a sweet spot. These seem to fall somewhere between the smoothness of 2 and the throatyness of 1 and 4.

Don't know if it was the pot, what your were playing, or where/how you were sweeping the wah, but number 3 started to remind me of some of the textures I hear in Cream's music. Who knows what subtleties from all of the samples may have been lost in the recording and in my speakers.

Joe, when you set these up, did you make sure the center of the pedal sweep was set at the center of the pot sweep?

[joegagan]

good question. each pot was adjusted to make sure that full R range of of pot was actuated. on 2 of the 5, centering is moot, the other 3 were centered.

thanks for the comments and taking the time to listen.

for the record, this is one of my fave era dunlops. the mid 90s with n30 inductor. 40 dollar local craigslist buy. all by itself, a great sounding wah. one of the pots in the test was the stock pot.

[joegagan]

No doublt the others could do the same if played differently.

i don't think so. you can't play slow enough or fast enough to make them sound the same as each other. see my charge/discharge theory in post above.
the other variable is how each mfgr actually constructs the traces. heaven knows exactly is being sent from each portion of the trace to each side in real time. there are tones that some pots get that others just can't. i've heard it over and over.