IT MAY SURPRISE
SOME READERS
TO KNOW THAT
THE WAH PEDAL
WAS ORIGINALLY
DEVELOPED FOR
TRUMPET PLAYERS,
a fact usually discovered when one
sets out to discover what recordings
Clyde McCoy played guitar on. Much
ado has been made about McCoy’s
involvement with wah circuitry, so many
of us figured he had to be a legendary
shredder. However, shortly after a
look into the man’s musical history, we
discover that he’s actually a celebrated
trumpet player, and it is to brass and
wood instrumentalists that wah was
originally marketed. Eventually, this
gave way to electric guitar and rock
music was all the better for it.
The first wah pedal was the Cry
Baby, mercilessly duplicated overseas
because the Thomas Organ Company
failed to do so. As such, it’s been
cloned, re-cloned, then re-cloned again,
resulting in hundreds of variants that all
follow the same basic topology. Only
a select few wahs deviate from this
circuit, usually omitting the high-priced
toroidal inductor in favor of different
filter types that still sound very wah-like
when manually swept. These deviators
include the Mu-Tron C200, Colorsound
Wah, Tychobrahe Parapedal, Korg Mr.
Multi and a few others.
However, most other wahs that exist
are riffs on this particular model.
Maestro, not to be outdone, needed
a wah in its product line and created
two: the Boomerang and the Boomer
2. Fortunately, Maestro wasn’t
comfortable cloning it straight away,
instead refining the circuit, and the
result was my favorite vintage inductorbased wah.
Unfortunately, cloning the Boomer 2 is
quite a feat for a few reasons. Firstly,
there are a couple weird parts, most
notably a 6uF electrolytic capacitor
and a 25k potentiometer. Most wah
potentiometers are equipped with a
mechanism that allows for foot control.
Because they are engineered as dropin replacements for Cry Baby pedals,
they all come in the same value—100k.
Secondly, wah parts are just plain
expensive. Empty wah shells start at 45
dollars, wah pots start at 17, and the
toroidal inductors start at 15. At this
point, you’re 77 bucks into the wah, not
counting other parts and labor. Add it
all up, and you start to wonder if it’s
worth it.
Fortunately, we’re going to build a
wah in a regular enclosure. As a bonus,
we’re including three common wah
mods, such as Q, bass response and
gain. As another bonus, we’re going to
add an expression jack where you need
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