Re: WAH WAHS

["Warren Sirota" <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

I love wah-wah, but I use it mainly to add expression to individual notes, to help make up for the fact that the guitar is not bowed. Jimi was ever my inspiration for this (also, I guess, Steve Stills' playing on Season of the Witch on that Supersession album from 1969 or so) , always hated funk auto-wah. Unfortunately, being as digital as I am is not good for wah-ing: I have never heard (and I gave up trying about 10 years ago, so this is a very outdated opinion) a digital wah-wah with any balls, and even if I found one, controlling it with a zipper-inducing MIDI cc pedal does not stand much of a chance of working, unless the wah-wah plug-in is very good at interpolating between zipper teeth (I know this is possible. whether anyone does it or not is another story).

I used a crybaby for many years. Sold it a while ago, but I still love the use of pedals to make individual notes more expressive - controlling ring mod depth, or using it like a mod wheel to push in some lfo modulation.

In contradiction to what I said above (that didn't take long) I *do* use one digital wah effect, or at least did recently - I used a very extreme wah-like effect ("Traveller") in my old Korg AX-1000g on http://warrensirota.com/Brian/Tuffer.mp3. One thing that was interesting (challenging) about the effect is that is was too extreme to use the full range of motion on your foot, resulting in a just-barely-on-the-edge-of-control aspect to the playing. And there's no zippering, because I was controlling via the integrated pedal, not via MIDI.


-- 
Warren
http://www.ubetoo.com/Artist.taf?_ArtistId=6679
http://www.warrensirota.com