"new" crybaby mod... crybaby wah to crybaby volume boost

[pinkjimiphoton]

i was dicking around last nite with one of my crybabys, and socketed the inductor so i could try different ones... i took a bag of old motorola inductors out of an old organ, and wanted to have a play to see which sounded best. so i took one of them "flea clip" rather than socket kinda 8 pin sockets, folded most of the legs over so just the opposing corners diagonally were connected, and started plugging inductors.
my fave was marked 52, and read about 1800mh. also used a 1m gagan smooth pot in it.
sourds really good.

but i noticed, when i pulled the inductor? the pedal acted like a volume pedal, or expression pedal... heel all the way back was a little below unity gain, but toe down was aBOVE unity a bit... and had a nice sparkle.

so i figured... hmmm... how to capitalize on this? turn it into a buffered pedal, i figured, with the wah always on!!

so all i had to do was switch the inductor in and out. i tried it, it actually worked so well i decided to go for it. it MAY need pulldown resistors! i used them from every point i thought may matter, and it DID make a difference. a little pop still tho when changing.

anyways, it was fairly easy.
using the stock crybaby parts even!!

dissconnect the three wires to the switch itself.. tape off the green wire, short the purple and blue wires together, and the wah becomes always on.


solder your inductor to one of the lugs on the switch, i used where the blue wire went. where the purple wire WAS,  tack a wire. also, tack a wire to the unused lead on the inductor.

what i did was make a second ic socket as a plug to plug in the first one, and soldered the two wires to the two outside poles diagonally <pins 3 and 6 on both sockets in this case>
plugged it in and tried it.

now in one mode, its a standard crybaby wah.
hit the switch, and it becomes an expression pedal with a bit of "boost" at toe down.

to ME? its useful... ymmv!! but i tried lifting the cap before to make a volume pedal, and it just plain didn't do much. lifting the inductor instead, ya don't get the "tone pedal" volume sound like you do with lifting the cap. it IS a little brighter full toe down but i think thats a fletcher-munson illusion.

anyways... its fairly easy, if anybody decides they wanna try it, let me know please!

the "new" mode is more of an expression pedal than a stock volume pedal... it won't go all the way off, but goes from about 6db below crybaby to about 6db above.. so a useable boost.

love to hear peeps thoughts!

[theehman]

I can't remember who it was, but I remember seeing a schematic of a production wah that did the same thing to turn it into a volume pedal.

[pinkjimiphoton]

me too. sadly i can't just check my mondo archive anymore, but brother mark hammer sent me a huge amount of files including some i'd never seen before, and i'm slowly digging up all the stuff i had on other drives.

i remember i think it was the mr crybaby that did something like this.

i could not get it to go full off, tho that may be cuz i used a 1meg gagan pot instead of the usual 100k.

always good to hear from ya ronnie!

[pinkjimiphoton]

what it sounds like in action, and how to do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7yUst2LW1Q