Help with Wah
I have a Cry Baby (original) wah as the first pedal in my chain. The next pedal is a Death by Audio Fuzz War, followed by a Boss Blues driver overdrive. When I click on the Wah, does absolutely nothing if the Fuzz war is on, but it works perfectly fine with the Blues Driver if I bypass the Fuzz war. Anyone have any ideas why this would be?
9 replies
Have you adjusted the knobs on the Fuzz War at all? Particularly the tone and gain. Like others have said the Fuzz War might just be overpowering the wah frequencies.
Also, try changing the cables around.
Does running the wah after the fuzz give the same result? I've never used a Fuzz War specifically but I had a heavily modded Big Muff and it would overpower several of the other effects I was running at the time. It did work better for me if I ran the other effect after the fuzz, but a gritty heavy fuzz can be overpowering
It does, but it sounds kinda meh. Do you think changing brand of wah would make a difference? Maybe the Fuzz War is the issue...
A different brand or model could do the trick. A more transparent wah will not be as prominent against a heavy fuzz or distortion. If you like the tone of the Fuzz War I would keep it and try other wahs.
A lot of fuzz pedals will do this because they produce harmonics on octaves above and below the predominant input frequency. If you're changing that predominant frequency with a parametric filter, the fuzz is working hard to undo it.
The way I remember it, overdrive guys liked wah -> OD, and fuzz guys liked fuzz -> wah. You boost the frequencies you want to OD versus "shaping" the fuzz.
I have a fuzz war clone and I run a cry baby mini after it. I think it sounds awesome but it depends what you want. I recall having the same issue as you which is why it's in that order.
I did try another wah when my original full size cry baby broke but it was even worse! That was a Morley lead/boost model I think, which just sounded shit with the noisy pedals I have.
I'm also running another couple of fuzzy things earlier than the fuzz war.. I think if I put the cry baby first it probably wouldn't work at all. Tbh all those pedals affect each other a crazy amount. I love the fuzz war sound but it's a pretty extreme effect as you'd expect from DBA.
Good luck with your experiments!
Get a guitar with a whammy bar is what the old ones would say.
So, I fucked around with it a bit and your suggestion did the trick. For some reason, I think I tried that a while back and had issues with the power supply. I hadn't moved it back to that position after getting new cables. Anyways, I appreciate your help
Hell yeah🤙