Should I buy a wah pedal or build one?

[falco_femoralis]

My hang up with wah pedals is I can't stand the Cry Baby enclosure. The Hotone enclosure is way better

 

[Stickman393]

The standard crybaby enclosure is...eh. the tension mechanism is crap. Not easily adjustable, difficult to assemble. PITA.

Mission engineering makes a much better enclosure. Eleca's take on that one is what you tend to find in rocktrons: both use a tensioning bolt in back to adjust rocker tension.

I Dunno if those AliExpress variants that come in kits online are made by Eleca too, but they're damned similar in design. Much lighter weight than the crybaby enclosures too..to such an extent that the rocktrons started putting metal weights in theirs at the heel. I suppose because they didn't want folks to feel theirs and go "oh, that feels cheap".

Personally: this is what I do with a crybaby enclosure. I rip out the grommits that pad the heel and toe, and replace them with thinner 8mm self-adhesive silicone door/drawer pads. It makes getting the switch height harder, but it's worthwhile for the extra range it gives ya.
Other folks have taken on the enclosure to better or worse effect...Ernie ball's take simply mills up a bit of aluminum U channel. Interesting design, but a real PITA to put together. Their circuit starts with some promise and then shits the bed around the inductor.

If you don't like crybaby enclosures...lemmie tell ya. You'd probably loathe old DeArmond or EHX wah enclosures. They're fucking...holy...fuck..tanks.

Same with snarling dogs. Fucking huge stupid big.

As much as Mr Fuller is a dirtbag, I gotta admit that the clyde enclosure was well executed.

One of these days I wanna try my hand at making my own. Finger jointed aluminum, maybe. Gonna take some time to get good enough with 3d modeling.

 

[dcfvgb]

Does anyone/where sell empty wah shells? There are a few projects I've been looking at.

 

[drgonzo1969]

Does anyone/where sell empty wah shells? There are a few projects I've been looking at.

The empty shells I have come across are a pain in the ass to assemble and usually come with mismatched or missing parts. You are better off buying a cheap wah or volume pedal and gutting it.

 

[Nostradoomus]

I’ve never paid more than 40 dollars (cdn) for a crybaby (working or not). They are cheap and plentiful and often still have all the hardware and pots inside.

 

[JohnnyCreepy]

I’m derailing this thread slightly, but this fits loosely on the topic. Is @Stickman393 or anyone else familiar with Morley wahs? I have VAI-2 with big board and through hole components, but it sucks tone and volume. My dirt pedals and amp doesn’t like it all and boosting is needed after the wah. Is modding in/out buffering component values the best way to make it suck less?

Schematic:

 

[Feral Feline]

Best way to make it suck less for you is to just get rid of it, but responsibly.
Send it to me, I'm authorised for the safe disposal of Morley products.

Does anyone/where sell empty wah shells? There are a few projects I've been looking at.

They're expensive.

Well, the good ones are. (SmallSynthBearCube)


Actually so are the cheap ones (TaoBao), because you don't get a lot for your money.

I've bought both the cheapohs and expensially-pricey-even-though-they-wahr-on-sale.

Mowahr pics in the thread-link belowah.

There are some threads on the forum to check out, such as this wahn.


Might be better to buy a used/broken wah and gut it/fix it/use it.

 

[Stickman393]

The empty shells I have come across are a pain in the ass to assemble and usually come with mismatched or missing parts. You are better off buying a cheap wah or volume pedal and gutting it.

Yes and no. I mean...there are plenty of resources online to guide one through the process. And if you have a working knowledge of fastener sizes and threads as well as an impressively organized inventory of common sizes that is surrounded by chaos and destruction like me, a missing fastener or two isn't a problem.

That said: I'm special. In both the positive and negative connotations.

Buying a crybaby and gutting it has a few advantages:

1) You get some pot. Er, a pot. If you get one with a hot potz II, you're golden. Those things last forever, and their taper is quite serviceable.

2) You get an inductor. Which...well...you might get a good one. Honestly: anything from before 1985 is ideal, anything from around 1985-1987 should be killed with fire, and anything from about 1988-1994 may yeild a really solid inductor. After that, it's a crap shoot. Dunlop switched to toroid inductors and those tended to be far more inconsistent.

3) the toothing on the eleca & pals rack and pinion don't match the Dunlop toothing. So, you'll probably need to do a little modification in order to use one of those with a d shaft pot.

I’m derailing this thread slightly, but this fits loosely on the topic. Is @Stickman393 or anyone else familiar with Morley wahs? I have VAI-2 with big board and through hole components, but it sucks tone and volume. My dirt pedals and amp doesn’t like it all and boosting is needed after the wah. Is modding in/out buffering component values the best way to make it suck less?

Ya know, though it doesn't answer your question straight up: this is a good time to point out one of the best kept secrets in wahs:

​

Huh. I'll be damned. It's a slightly modified crybaby.

 

[Stickman393]

I’m derailing this thread slightly, but this fits loosely on the topic. Is @Stickman393 or anyone else familiar with Morley wahs? I have VAI-2 with big board and through hole components, but it sucks tone and volume. My dirt pedals and amp doesn’t like it all and boosting is needed after the wah. Is modding in/out buffering component values the best way to make it suck less?

A'ite: here's your buffer and switch section only this guy.



So...thoughts...

Its serviceable. Op amp input/output buffer with Jfet switching. Better than average, really. All run on a single TL074 that also shares duties elsewhere in the circuit.

Anything I could say about this isn't likely to be helpful. What is it about the pedal that makes it not behave in your rig?

 

[JohnnyCreepy]

I guess volume and low freq losses are the main problems. I even added Q-pot and three switches for caps change in wah side, but my dislike comes when the wah is bypassed with buffering.

Edit. looked buffer circuit, double up C5 and C17 values?

 

[Stickman393]

Truthfully...hmm.

Well, keep in mind my advice is unlikely to be fully-informed. Still learnin.

But: you have an effective capacitence of a hair less than 20nF between your in and out buffers. C5 is directly in series with C16 in bypass, and the law of series capacitence is 1/Ctotal= 1/C5 + 1/C16.

Honestly, I don't see why you couldn't bump both up. I'm not seeing a resistance in parallel to ground, so I can't tell ya exactly how it all works in terms of filtering out low frequencies. But larger coupling caps will be able to pass lower, frequencies more efficiently. Dunno exactly what the limitations are here though: I COULD be wrong here, but it occurs to me that too much bass content might overload the input of the TL074. Hell, I don't know. I'm just a simple stickman. Bang rocks.

C17 is also a good candidate to bump up, and that guy...sky's the limit. Do whatcha want there.

The good news is that OP amp buffers are perfectly capable of achieving unity gain. That 10k on the end of the whole thing might be an attempt to make the pedal "fuzz friendly". Couldn't tell ya for sure. You could try inching that thing down a schosh.

 

[JohnnyCreepy]

Thanks branchdude, I’ll tinker with it after done with couple other projects.

 

[Stickman393]

You got it, Billy Eldritch.

 

[HamishR]

When I was younger I didn't mind snot. These days, not so much.

 

[HamishR]

For the record, a few years ago I bought a Dunlop mini-wah. Played it for a hour, got it well and truly out of my system and it has never been plugged in again. The concept of wah might be fine - it should be able to be used in an intelligent and musical way. But the way I hear it used most of the time is simply to add an ugly noise to a guitar solo. It rarely actually adds to the music. Most of the time I feel that solo would have sounded better without the wah. If you enjoy wah, have at it! No judgement on my part. Well, maybe a bit. Ok a lot. Just because you have a wah doesn't mean you have to use it.

I quite like the way that the Beatles and Mick Ronson would use a wah. They would set it where they felt it sounded good and leave it there. Perversely I DO quite like a cocked-wah sound. But generally I think a wah is a difficult pedal to use well.

 

[Stickman393]

Stickman has gone apoplectic. Quick! Someone call the wahhhhmbulence!

 

[JohnnyCreepy]

For the record, a few years ago I bought a Dunlop mini-wah. Played it for a hour, got it well and truly out of my system and it has never been plugged in again. The concept of wah might be fine - it should be able to be used in an intelligent and musical way. But the way I hear it used most of the time is simply to add an ugly noise to a guitar solo. It rarely actually adds to the music. Most of the time I feel that solo would have sounded better without the wah. If you enjoy wah, have at it! No judgement on my part. Well, maybe a bit. Ok a lot. Just because you have a wah doesn't mean you have to use it.

I quite like the way that the Beatles and Mick Ronson would use a wah. They would set it where they felt it sounded good and leave it there. Perversely I DO quite like a cocked-wah sound. But generally I think a wah is a difficult pedal to use well.

My use would consider using wah after dirt and before delay to give some modulation to repetitive stoner/sludge/doom riffs in same way resonance filter is slowly sweeped with electronic compositions to control overtones making up (microish-like) tonality. Or that is how I imagine what I want to do.

 

[Nostradoomus]

^same, I just use it as a slow filter…not as a Kirk Hammett thing

 

[Harry Klippton]

I always think I'm a wah guy but I am not a wah guy. Perhaps one day I will become the wah guy that I believe myself to be in my heart.

I saw Disfear in about 2004 in an American Legion hall when they were touring for Misanthropic Generation. Ulf Cederlund was using a Morley wah. That was great

 

[Paradox916]

I always think I'm a wah guy but I am not a wah guy.

right here… It never sounds like I want it too, maybe its the context in which I’m trying to use it, the way the pot is clocked, perhaps my poor sense of coordination and timing.