Probably a stupid question, but does there exist a plugin or tool that can remove (or diminish) wah pedal effects from an isolated guitar track?
I transcribe music, and I sometimes come into possession of original instrument stems for the music I'm transcribing. Even with the isolated guitar track, the wah effect can sometimes make it difficult to hear what's actually going on (I'm talking mainly about very fast/chaotic metal music where the guitarist is flapping the wah pedal like a tasered duck's beak). I believe that if I could solidify the tone by removing the timbre-shifting effect of a wah pedal, it would work wonders for the audibility of individual notes.
Obviously I don't need the plugin or tool to preserve the original studio quality of the audio or to make it sound convincingly de-wahed to a casual listener, it's purely for making the audio more uniform and easier to "read".
Do such dark arts exist?
Cheers!
Try a dynamic EQ or spectral EQ to kill the frequency resonance?
Wah is just extreme EQ resonance swept up and down by the pedal.
Eeeesh that seems like a tall order. I would maybe just look at the signal through a spectrum analyzer in maybe a couple different display modes and look for where the peak frequencies are. or look at a spectrogram and just kind of eyeball a visual average from the heat map. because I'm thinking in order for the sound to still totally fit in it has to either have harmonics and peaks in some sort of tonal way, or oscillate around an average that does.
Are you using a DAW? My first thought was to go by ear with the notes as you hear them, slap tasered duck wah wah on top and then compare the EQ to the guitar stem. If you're hitting the same peaks and troughs you know you can't be too far off target. I realize this sounds simpler than it is.
I fear that this could be an expensive alpha india plugin in the near future.