The FX Files: Digitech Whammy

THE DIGITECH WHAMMY PITCH-SHIFTER WAS ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT INNOVATIONS IN PEDAL TECH AND IS STILL A MUST-OWN

TREADLE:

The treadle (lever) is the defining feature of the Whammy, whether used for expressive garbling of notes like Tom Morello, sound effect-like squeals, or kicking a solo up a notch. By dynamically changing the pitch, the character of the player can come through much more clearly, and there are literally thousands of ways to use the effect. Some players park it in toe down or heel down, some sweep between the two and accent particular notes, some use the act of sweeping as a sound effect in itself, and some experimental players park it part way through its sweep, for radically bitcrushed, dissonant sounds.

MODE(WHAMM YVONLY):

The modern Whammy V improved the tracking of the pedal, and added the ability to play polyphonic sounds, allowing for chords. However, knowing that many players were using the Whammy for its idiosyncratic sound, the engineers at Digitech included a toggle to revert it to the glitchier tones of the Whammy IV, which would glitch on a chord input.

PITCHKNOB:

There are three areas to the pitch control – harmony, to the left, detune, on the top right, and the pitch-shift settings on the right. Although the names for some settings changed between models, broadly the harmonies on the left are a set of intervals within the octave, where toe down and heel down on the treadle are each a different harmony setting, allowing for some very unusual intervals to be created on-the-fly. The two detune settings are basically like a shallow and deep chorus, and the pitch-shift intervals are +2 octaves, +1 octave, -1 octave and -2 octaves. On the original Whammy there was a -2nd setting that was renamed to ‘detune’ on some later models – you can hear this very clearly being used in the main riff for Swervedriver’s classic Never Losethatfeeling. Finally, later models of the Whammy included a dive bomb setting that emulated the sound of a whammy bar dropping the pitch until the strings are slack.