Crybaby Basics -- Using the Dunlop Crybaby Wah Pedal

Hi and welcome to Gas Music. Today we're unpacking one of the most inescapable sounds in rock, the crying wail produced by a wah-wah pedal. We're not going to unravel the circuitry of the beast -- we're Gas Musicians, not gear heads. If you're sitting there in a panic with a hot solder gun in one hand and a disintegrating vintage potentiometer in the other, you need tech support. We're here to learn something about the wah, including how it works, why it works, and how different players have handled it. 


The sound of a wah wah pedal is created by a "tonal sweep," which means the signal is passed through a relatively short spectrum of high and low, or bass and treble, tonalities. The sweep is controlled by a kind of accelerator pedal -- press down, and the tone gains high end, ease up, and it swings toward the low end. It's almost comically simple: take the standard bass/treble control on an amplifier, turn it sideways, connect it to a foot pedal with a little gain boost, and put in a box on the floor. Voila! You have yourself a "tonal sweep."

This a simple idea, but matched up with an electric guitar it has otherworldly results. What is it about the sound of the wah that catches our attention? Maybe it's based in the deep-seated human reaction to a baby crying. According to research, there are few sounds in the world that motivate humans like a crying baby:

"The sound of a baby cry captures your attention in a way that few other sounds in the environment generally do," said Katie Young of the University of Oxford. She scanned the brains of 28 people while they listened to the sound of babies and adults crying and sounds of animal distress including cats meowing and dogs whining. Young found an early burst of activity in the brain in response to the sound of a baby cry... The reaction to other sounds was not as intense."
Alok Jha, The Guardian, Wednesday 17 October 2012

For an exhaustive review of the wah pedal's history, here's a great article. Here you can learn the entire story of the wah pedal, including a long passage from a classic article in Guitar Player. It's a good review of the way a little ingenuity can alter history.

 

The Wah Pedal in its Natural Environment

 

The place most people encounter the wah sound is in a guitar solo of the wailing variety. Jimi Hendrix, the avatar of wah, provided many of us with the old-school standard of wah soloing via "All Along the Watchtower" or any number of other tunes. Here's one of my favorites:

Jimi Hendrix "Voodoo Chile"

Players still draw on this for the blueprint of their own tower of wah, of course; the wah sound hasn't really changed much in the past 50 years, and you'll still hear it all over "modern rock" radio. 

There's another, and arguably more interesting, way that the wah has been used in rock, and that's in funk and disco. One of the greatest songs of all time, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" by the Temptations, uses the wah not to build wailing walls of sound, but to create a chilling, even tragic atmosphere.

"Papa Was a Rolling Stone"

 

The Wah Experience

The first time I heard someone play an electric guitar through a crybaby wahwah pedal was in 1977. I was a wannabe high school guitar god trying to be cool, and the guy playing was my main competitor, a dude named Chad who had cool hair and a sweet Les Paul copy that his parents bought for him. During what passed for sound check, I heard Chad playing the intro riff to "Voodoo Child," the Hendrix classic, and when he hit that Crybaby I knew that I had to have one too. So I saved up my lawn-mowing money and bought myself one. It didn't take long to get the hang of it, and in the years since then, through countless gigs on stages tiny and not-so-tiny, I have used a Dunlop Crybaby wah pedal as part of my signal chain (the main other effect I use is the Pro Co Rat pedal). It's a solid piece of equipment, tough and durable, and if you want that classic wailing wah-wah sound, there's really no substitute.

 

The Wah Pedal: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Okay, finally we have to say a word or two about that moment when an awesome wah wah solo turns into an unbearable ordeal. Of all the guitar effects in all the world, none wear out their welcome more quickly than the wah, so have a heart -- rock a CryBaby, but do it mindfully! Everyone from your upstairs neighbors to the people in the back of the auditorium will thank you. 

Dunlop GCB95 The Original Cry Baby® Wah Wah

 
This is the real deal, the pedal that I first heard back in 1977. It's been around forever, and no wonder -- it's virtually indestructible. Made of heavy die-cast steel (talk about heavy metal!), this pedal can take a lot of manhandling. I have dropped mine of stages, downstairs, and one time out of a moving van, and other than a few dents it never showed any damage. The Crybaby is a true rock machine.

Dunlop 535Q Cry Baby® Multi-Wah

Normally I'd object to messing with a good thing, but I played through the 535Q for awhile and have to admit that it does what it says it will. There are a number of ways to shape the range of sound with this pedal -- you can "sharpen" the range to make the distance less between high and low tones, or do the opposite and open them up to broad, smoother wah effects. Dunlop says this is the "swiss Army Knife" of wah wah pedals, which is a kind of cool way to think of it; it's also the preferred wah pedal of Joe Satriani.