Morley Mini Steve Vai Bad Horsie 2 Contour Wah
STEVE VAI’S ICONIC SIGNATURE WAH-WAH PEDAL GETS ANOTHER OVERHAUL, THIS TIME WITH AN IMPROVED BUFFER.
Legend has it, there are few guitarists more demanding to design signature gear for than Steve Vai. You don’t rise to such technical and compositional levels of excellence without being extremely driven, and Vai’s demands on gear companies are the thing of legend. So when he turned to Morley to design a signature wah pedal, I’m sure a few white hairs sprung up on the heads of Morley engineers.
That was in the mid ‘90s, and the result was the Bad Horsie Wah. It must have been a comfortable collaboration in the end, though, because it was followed shortly thereafter by the Bad Horsie 2, which benefitted from the addition of a footswitchable second mode called Contour, which enables the user to adjust Q and wah level. The Bad Horsie 2 has remained in the catalogue consistently ever since, but Morley continues to tinker, now releasing the Bad Horsie 20/20 as part of a new line kitted out with Morley’s super reliable 20/20 buffer to maintain your signal strength and integrity when the effect is not engaged.
At heart, this is still a Bad Horsie 2 Contour Wah. It still features switchless activation – that is, there’s no footswitch at the toe-end of the pedal’s travel to engage the effect. You simply move the pedal and the wah effect begins. Take your foot off, and the wah effect tails off over a period of 1.5 seconds. Or you can pop the bottom off the pedal and adjust a tiny internal trim pot for your preferred off time, from instantaneously all the way up to 3.5 seconds.
The next design twist is the pedal’s operation itself. Instead of using an assembly to rotate a potentiometer when the pedal is moved like other wahs, Morley pedals use an Electro-Optical design which uses an LED light array and a light-sensitive sensor to control the wah sweep. What this means is that instead of stepping on the pedal to rotate a pot, stepping on the pedal brings the LEDs closer to the sensor – and the nearer it gets, the higher the tone sweep gets.
The benefits are twofold: extremely smooth linear wah sweep, and, best of all, no pots to wear out and become all scratchy and noisy. Some higher end tremolo and compressor pedals use similar technology to regulate the effect dependent on internal settings or the strength of the input signal, but it’s a logical fit for expression pedal effects.
There’s also a Bad Horsie/Contour switch for selecting between two wah voices, plus two knobs that are engaged in Contour mode: Tone and Wah Level. This is great for adding some extra oomph to your wah sound, since some wahs tend to thin out the gain a little when they’re engaged.
Being a Vai signature item, the Bad Horsie 20/20 is a modern-sounding, hi-fi, powerful wah with a sort of smoothness in the high end that allows the pedal to sound round and ‘glossy’ even when you floor it. The top quarter of the pedal’s sweep is especially good for pulling pinch harmonics out of guitars that usually put up a bit of a fight against such techniques, and it even made my Ibanez’s neck pickup squeal with Dimebag-style harmonics.
Vai’s original Bad Horsie mode is the best way to get a ready-to-go sound out of this pedal, but fiddling around with the Contour and Level controls in the Contour mode reveals fresh layers of flexibility. With the Contour control down low, the sweep reminds me of the classic fat Jimi Hendrix wah tone, with darker treble and reduced range compared to the wild sweep of Bad Horsie mode, and yet a hi fi sheen that takes the classic “wow-wow” wah sound of the ‘60s and drags it into the future.
Was the refresh necessary? Well, with more players using digital profilers or more complex rigs compared to the general ‘heads and cabs’ era the Bad Horsie was designed in, it makes sense to enhance the signal fidelity as gear needs evolve.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If you’re familiar with the wah tones of Zakk Wylde and Nuno Bettencourt when they used Morley wah pedals in their golden years – or if, of course, you’ve listened to Vai in the last decade or so – you have a rough idea of the charm of Morley wah pedals. The sweep is bold and drastic, and the tones have a glassy sheen which leaves no doubt as to whether the effect is on or not, even under huge amounts of distortion.
Vai’s own spin on this classic effect is as extroverted and extravagant as the man himself, and whether you want to put a bit more Vai in your sound, or you just want a flexible and in-your-face wah pedal, it’s worth saddling up this Bad Horsie for a test. And if you’re a collector, the Bad Horsie just got even cooler with this new livery.