A Few Wah Tricks and Tips

Normally, the wah pedal is the first effect the guitar’s signal passes through on its way to your amplifier, with distortion following. If you’re after a more wicked wah sound, swap it out with the distortion, so that you have the signal chain: guitar > distortion > wah > amp. Both Brian May and Carlos Santana have used this configuration to great effect. But there’s an even wilder sound lurking inside your wah pedal! Jimi Hendrix used it first on his album Axis Bold As Love. All you have to do is reverse your connections into the wah. That is, you plug the guitar into the wah’s output, then the signal emerges from the input. What you get with this is a sort of raw synth sound – a screaming, shrieking sine wave. By rocking the pedal back and forth slowly, you can actually control the pitch. This is easier to accomplish in the studio, since it takes a few minutes to unhook everything, then reconnect with the wah’s in and out reversed. Obviously, this isn’t something you’d want to do often – a little bit of this sound goes a long way, but it’s worth trying!