the answers

A wah pedal is like an exercise bike. We buy one with the best of intentions, then use it way less than we planned. That’s a shame because it’s a versatile effect. A Cry Baby will nail the Hendrix thing, the 70s porn stuff, White Room, not to mention the cocked wah sound of Mick Ronson and Mark Knopfler’s Money For Nothing riff. If you’ve got the chops you can use your wah to make your guitar talk like Steve Vai does on Dave Lee Roth’s Yankee Rose. Texan blues icon Stevie Ray Vaughan often ran two 60s Vox wahs together. So don’t just think of a wah pedal as a one-trick pony.

01 Actually, wah pedals have come a long way since the 60s. Take a look at the excellent Voodoo Lab Wahzoo [c£230]. Offering three pedals in one, you get a 60s vintage wah setting, an Auto-Wah for 70s style funk stuff and the cool Step function. This allows you to set a sequence of up to 30 positions on the wah’s sweep then automatically play them back. It’s like a wah version of The Who’s Baba O’Reilly.

02 If you want to create your own wah sounds you should consider the Dunlop JP95 John Petrucci Cry Baby Wah [c£219]. This is basically the Dream Theater shredder’s take on your classic Cry Baby with knobs on. To be more precise, there are a bunch of internal trim pots to control volume, Q and a six-band EQ to shape the tone. The Q control alters the intensity of the pedal’s tonal sweep. This allows you to tailor the sound from bold modern sounds to the sweeter top end of vintage units and countless points in between.

03 You can run your pedals in any order you like. You’re hardly going to rip a hole in the space/time continuum if you mess around with sequences and experimentation is what created iconic guitar tones in the first place. But we much prefer what happens when you run the wah into an overdrive/distortion/fuzz box. You get interesting and unpredictable overtones when the filth is feeding off the wah’s tonal sweep. It’s just not the same when you harness the pedals the other way round. Jimi Hendrix had his wah at the front of his signal chain, so there.