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Wah-wah, you’ve made me such a big star

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An exchange on the Hendrix thread has bethought me that it’s necessary to have a thread celebrating the wah-and furthermore-wah.

Bring forth your pedal-bothering heroes!

Here’s some wah-wah sax to kick things off.

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Comments

    • Follow the guitar lead to see the sum total of Jimi’s effects pedals in that clip. A Vox wah-wah and a Arbiter Fuzz-Face plugged into the Marshall amps. Both now available again as retro vintage items.

      Today a guitarist of any stature has a complex multi thousand dollar digital effects rack powered by a backstage computer. Jimi had a couple of 9 volt batteries.

      • Also, conventional wisdom says you put the overdrive before the wah but Jimi, being Jimi, put it after. So he distorted the wah rather then wahing the distortion. Nerdy, but these things matter.

          • Oh sensationally brilliant. Love the main playing and also the slightly jazzy playing in octaves and with his fingers – never seen him do that before. On the money I’d say. Of course re equipment there is a school of thought which says batteries and separate pedals are more tonesome. I had one of the 60s wah wahs – they were real tone suckers when they were switched off, leaving you with a weedy feeble sound when not wahing, which is maybe why Jimi put the fuzz after it, to beef up the tone a bit. These days people would blanche and say “what? No true bypass or at least a buffer in front…arrrgh”. When you’re Jimi Hendrix such things become irrelevant. Later he had effects built by Roger Meyer, and indeed invented a few.

            • Everything about that clip is great. Jimi’s laid-back, beyond cool stage announcements are just perfect. And he’s making more sense there than usual. That’s a CBS Strat (post 1965), so it’s possible he just picked a new one off the peg. No favourite, vintage instrument for Jimi. And he re-tunes mid-song too.

              I love the back line – Jimi and Noel with two 100w Marshall stacks each and not miked up through the PA by the look of it.

              I had a mate who worked at Sound City on Shaftesbury Avenue in the 60s and he sold me one of the first Cry Baby wah-wahs to come into stock. They were first made in 1966, but didn’t become widely available for a year or so. It cost £25 which was two weeks wages back then, but I think he got it for me at, ahem, “mate’s rates”.

              • Those amps look deafening!

                I love this whole clip, but I think it’s Jimi off-form – fascinatingly so. He looks bored, the audience are deathly silent he never smiles… and then he appears to give up about 8 minutes in! Mitch’s drum solo is glorious, though.

  7. Ooh good thread. Here’s Jeff Healey, mentioned in passing in the mighty blues podcast as a full on blast it out second generation blues/rock player, never better than here in full wah mode…

  9. Jan Akkerman rarely uses wah-wah (at least, not as a major thing – sometimes he’ll put a little in the background in studio recordings), but this is his one unapologetic up-to-11 outing with it, on Brainbox’s 1969 single ‘Amsterdam, the First Days’. As ever with Akkerman, he brings something totally unique to it:

  10. I’d love to be super cool and pretend I only ever discovered wah wah when I heard “Voodoo chile” (a bit like those people who squeak about “seeing Bowie on TOTP doing “Starman” was when it all made sense for me”) but in truth it was this shaky effort by Marc Bolan, and you know what, I still like it.

      • Good call, Moose! The same theme (bizarrely) was also used for another BBC comedy in the same era (To The Manor Born). Could Ronnie not be bothered writing another tune?

        McLaughlin rarely used wah-wah in the late 60s/70s, preferring machine gun bullets of precise notes, but he gives it a go on the pre-Mahavishnu ‘Dragon Song’ from 1970> the presence of Jimi’s rhythm section and engineer might have had an influence.

      • Steve Vai (with David Lee Roth) in ’86 making his guitar talk with a wah wah. Guitar in at 1.46 for the faint hearted. Very funny video if you like that sort of thing.

        https://youtu.be/EI923Y_Er_4

        ’87’s “Surfing with the alien ” but Joe Satriani is drenched in wah wah, not least the title track.

    • It is 1989 actually, according to Wikipedia so it must be true, and you could have heard wah wah on the Jeff Healey clip above in 88. Soz n’all.

  16. 1992 – The Beastie Boys, wary of another convoluted process of sample-clearing of the kind they’d had to go through to get Paul’s Boutique out there, decided to simply make their own funk. And for a raggedy trio of punkers they funked it good – including Adrock pedalling like a bastard through pretty much the whole album. Hurrah!

  17. Wah-wah as manipulator of yer actual ambient tone wash, rather than emphasising yer rivmic melodies….

    Wah all the way through this, often to roll some treble off – but the key wah/echo moment is around 2 min 11 sec……and it’s a single push….

    • I listened to that album yesterday, John – and when ‘Blue Condition’ was playing I thought (honestly), ‘I wonder if JC puts this in the top 50% of Cream recordings?’ And then when the cockney knees-up ast the end came on I thought something similar. Well?

      • Couple of mitigating circs there Colin.

        Blue Condition is one of Ginger’s tracks. Just like Ringo with the Beatles, he was allowed a song or two on every Cream outing, no matter how gruesome the results. My client would also like Pressed Rat and Warthog to be taken into account, your honour. Taken out of context now I can see how they might appear a little odd, but those tracks of Ginger’s just seemed to be part of the overall picture at the time.

        As for Mother’s Lament, I agree, it casts a dark and unpleasant blight on the entire Cream catalogue. It probably seemed like a wacky idea at the time.

        On the other hand @minibreakfast maintains it’s the best track on Disraeli Gears. Youngers, eh?

    • The thing about ‘Tales Of…’, JC, is that’s it pretty cringeworthy. Four chords and 4th form lyrics. Definitely one of the bottom 5% of Cream tracks for me. I daresay the relentless wah-wah-ing was what made it appeal, if it did, at the time.

      ‘Wrapping Paper’, their first single, was widely panned at the time but today it seems far more interesting, nuanced, and musical than stuff like ‘Tales…’

      • Oh yeah, Tales… was a big track at the time, almost up there with Sunshine Of Your Love. I suppose the wah-wah had major novelty value in 1967 and those trippy “4th form lyrics” were par for the course, all adding to the overall psych ambience of the album.

        I was a fan of the much-derided Wrapping Paper in 1966, despite it sounding nothing like we expected from the band.

  21. The late great Terry Kath of the errr mixed bag Chicago did a cracker solo using Wah Wah on one of their best songs 25 or 6 to 4.
    0n the phone so can’t be arsed trying to post a clip.

    • Well, it had occurred to me Steve. Somehow, like many George tracks of the time (with Specweird’s production) it manages to sound both massive and as flimsy as a tea-towel at the same time. Like encasing a giant candyfloss in concrete or something. You could never accuse Goege of composing rock songs, could you?

  26. OK, it’s time to pull out the big guns. Here’s Blind Faith with Presence Of The Lord from the 1969 Yewtree album (© Moose). I see it’s been censored on this clip.

    Everything’s drifting along nicely until 2.35 when the compression is turned up to eleven and Eric unleashes maximum wah-wah. Contrary to what I said earlier, THIS is peak wah-wah

  27. Another early 70s stalwart, Tony McPhee. Bomb and Split were powerful albums.

    And Huw Lloyd Langdon Worth checking out at 12.00> My favourite Hawkwind album.

    And John McGeoch on this chestnut

  32. In the blues podcast I said that it was an Aussie band playing Chicago blues that first got me into da blooz.

    Lead guitarist uses the wah wah tastefully in the intro to their “boogie”.

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