Wah Project Advice Needed

[Jdansti]

I'm planning a wah project and looking for a shell. I could buy one from a couple of vendors for around $42 + shipping, which would be around $50 total. -OR- I could buy one of the following on eBay cheaper and gut them. The eBay selections would already have jacks and a pot (although the pot might not be the type I want). Please give me your opinion of the following for this project. Should I just go for the cheapest?

Washburn Bad Dog  $25
 


Pyle PPDLWW1  $32  



ROGUE WP-101 $36  
   

[theehman]

check your local craigslist for a used Dunlop.  I see them all the time in the $25-$30 range.

[deadastronaut]

@jon: i have one one of those ''daphon'' but the volume pedal version, cost £14.00 on ebay..  it has 4 jacks etc...a level adjustment pot too...low /hi etc...

worth the money just for experimental purposes...it takes my weight and i'm by no means skinny..


or go with rons suggestion...for a proper sturdy one.  

[Electron Tornado]

Those prices mentioned for ebay and Craig's List are about right. They are also better deals than $40 for an enclosure alone. It's especially good if your project is mostly just adding mods to the basic Cry Baby. Go for the hefty cases.

[joegagan]

i have one of those washburn wahs. it is pretty nice although the pot is POS
if i recall, the inductor was actually pretty nice. enclosure is metal, which the other ones pictured aren't. the mechanicals are sound.

if you get a crybaby made after the mid90s, chances are it will have a hotpotz2. a very good pot.

[Ronan]

Where do you get a new wah shell for around $42 plus shipping? Best I can find is $44 from Mammoth.
New shells are scarce in Australia.

[Jdansti]

Where do you get a new wah shell for around $42 plus shipping? Best I can find is $44 from Mammoth.
New shells are scarce in Australia.

I'm in the US and this is what I get on the Mammoth site:

http://www.mammothelectronics.com/4SWah-Enclosure-p/500-1008.htm

[Jdansti]

i have one of those washburn wahs. it is pretty nice although the pot is POS
if i recall, the inductor was actually pretty nice. enclosure is metal, which the other ones pictured aren't. the mechanicals are sound.

if you get a crybaby made after the mid90s, chances are it will have a hotpotz2. a very good pot.

Thanks. I've got a Thomas Organ Cry Baby I bought around 1978, but I'm trying to decide if I want to do the mod I'm thinking about on it. I drilled a couple of holes in it when I was a teenager for an LED and an on/off switch, so it's not exactly like it was when I bought it. What I'm thinking about doing is adding a jack so that when an LFO or some other "controller" is plugged into the jack, the pot would be disconnected and the controller would take over.  The reason I am thinking about using a jack to connect the controller is so that I can play around with different types of control. For example, LFOs, LDRs, etc. Once I've got controllers to where they are compatible with the wah, they would live in a different enclosure(s) and I would only have to plug them in to the wah to use them. When nothing is plugged in, the wah would function normally.

What do you think?  Pie in the sky or something worth doing?

[Ronan]

What do you think?  Pie in the sky or something worth doing?

Very possible. Its a good idea to have something experimental to plug into it, so if the experiment is not good, it doesn't take time to rewire the pedal back to normal.

Ahhh, of course, but there is an extra $2 or $3 for the pedal rubber tread...second hand wah pedals usually go for $60 to $80 minimum in Australia, on ebay, if you get one in pristine condition then its possibly worth it, but a brand new one for $60 shipped to Oz, is also a good deal, but you have to paint it.

[Jdansti]

Ahhh, of course, but there is an extra $2 or $3 for the pedal rubber tread...second hand wah pedals usually go for $60 to $80 minimum in Australia, on ebay, if you get one in pristine condition then its possibly worth it, but a brand new one for $60 shipped to Oz, is also a good deal, but you have to paint it.

Aha-I didn't look at the options for extra $$$.  Anyway, the point was that at least where I live, I haven't found new wah enosures in my price range of < $30. I just completed the purchase of the $25 Bad Dog on eBay, so I'll probably experiment on it and not mess up my old Cry Baby.

[Ronan]

Sounds like a very good plan. Lucky you! The Bad Dog looks good.

Edit - An idea for you, for what its worth, if you can fit a dual 100K pot into your wah pedal, one of the 100K pots can often be used as an expression pedal with it's own RTS (stereo) output jack. Gives dual function to the pedal, if you happen to be able to use an expression pedal, that is.

[Jdansti]

Great idea-thanks!  No need right now, but that will probably change now that you've planted that idea in my brain!

That gives me an idea, though.  I wonder what two wahs would sound like working in reverse of each other. When one goes up, the other goes down at the same time and vice-versa. If you had a dual pot with one of them backwards and two wah boards, you could do this. It might sound like crap, but I'd like to try it.  

EDIT:

OR...two pots going in the same direction, but with one of them offset from the other so you get a dual wah with two different tones at the same time. You might have to calibrate it so that the result would be "pleasant to the ear" if that's possible. Hmmm...

[Ronan]

That is heading into formant (vocal sound) territory. I think the Craig Anderton anti-wah does what you are thinking of, but uses different circuits. I would never discourage anyone from experimenting with 2 wahs or filters, it really is a lot of fun.

[deadastronaut]

the runoffgroove ''ph0zer'' has twin wahs...but i think they are in parallel, with an lfo too

could be interesting have 1 wah forward/ 1 wah backward......i'm guessing a bit phaser-ish depending on the 2 fiters....might sound good.

[joegagan]

around 05 i cobbled in a second bracket for a second pot. never mind the sloppiness, prototype, personal use etc.

i recommend  not using a dual gang, you are stuck with the rotary orientation of both togther. with the opposing bracket system, you can rotate the second pot to a more optimal orientation for whatever the second pot controls. i found this necessary in the applications i used them for ( i did 2 of these)

this one has a 9mm alpha pot controlling the mix function on a $20 arion octave pedal. i installed a dpdt switch to reverse the sweep, so the lower octave can sweep in as the wah goes more trebly. turns out this was my favorite setting

sounds like this: ( turn down your speakers first)

[joegagan]

[Jdansti]

Good idea, Joe. I hadn't even thought about doing it from the other direction...same for the pot!

Nice sounds!

[joegagan]

(homer simpson voice):
'i get jokes" (lefty bit)

[Mark Hammer]

That is heading into formant (vocal sound) territory. I think the Craig Anderton anti-wah does what you are thinking of, but uses different circuits. I would never discourage anyone from experimenting with 2 wahs or filters, it really is a lot of fun.

When it comes to "anti-wah", I think one of the things to keep in mind is that sounding vocal-ey is not as simple as simply counter-sweeping.  The filter (or wah, if that's your flavour) that sweeps upward doesn't, or shouldn't, necessarily sweep as far upwards, as the upper one sweeps downwards.  A person may have to use series or parallel resistances with the foot-controlled pot sections to introduce the optimum amount of relative sweep for each filter section.

Then there is the tricky and sticky matter of the relative taper of the two pot sections.  As you are no doubt aware, people can be pretty picky (and for good reasons) about their preferred wah-pot taper.  Finding a dual-ganged pot where the taper of each section is exactly what you want...well, I'll trade you my hen's-tooth necklace for it.

That said, it's not a reason to decline attempting it.  Just be realistic in what you expect.

Finally, Craig Anderton had a little article in Guitar Player way back about using an optoisolator to replace a scratchy pot in a Clyde McCoy wah.  Once you have a single, easily replaceable pot electronically controlling another device, that opens up possibilities for tweaking taper, range, and such.

[Jdansti]

Thanks Mark. All good points.  Regarding two pots sweeping in the same direction, but slightly offset, I imagine this almost sounding like two guitars playing the pitches and timing in unison, but the two wah sweeps not being in unison. I'd have to play with the pot differential to see what would sound best. I don't think that for this purpose, the pots' tapers would have to match, or that the two filter circuits would have to be identical either. I want a certain amount of difference between the two sweeping sounds. This would sort of (but not really) be like how the multiple piano strings for a given note are not perfectly in tune but still have a desirable sound.

In the same way, if I had counter rotating pots, I don't know that they would have to have matching tapers to "sound good". I might be ok with a non-vocal sounding system. I was just trying to imagine what the counter pots would sound like. I imagine that the effect would be similar to two players playing a scale in opposite directions, but with the tone changing instead of the pitch.

Another aspect of this dueling wah theory is that if I had two wah circuits in one enclosure with both being active at the same time, I would have to treat them as parallel effects with proper buffering, right?