The wah-wah pedal and an echo loop are the devices I've used consistently in their various forms ever since the seventies and here's the beauty part: Del Casher invented both of them. (LAWeekly: 50 Years Ago, the Wah-Wah Pedal Was Born in a Hollywood Hills Garage)
Summarizing the article does no service since much of it is in Casher's words and they're cool words. One day he was hanging about in his studio when someone knocked at the door. It was Frank Zappa. Yes, extremely cool words.
The Echoplex is one of the earliest tape loop delays but it's not the one Casher invented. This is the one I used and had a whale of time with it but analog days were drawing down and I haven't seen one of these in use in many years.
There was a large looping tape under the cover and that would accommodate about three minutes of my deathless jams. At the right moment, I could flip that over to playback and then wail freeform lead over the top of the chords. Even for that time, this was a radical device.
After Hendrix, everyone had to have a wah-wah and the Cry Baby wah-wah may have done the best since those were all over the place. I didn't see wah-wah as invoking any kind of musical devils since I had heard trumpeters from the swing bands getting a somewhat similar effect with a mute. I saw the wah-wah as an electronic extension of that and fitting for the new age.
It was a hugely popular device.
There wasn't much inside it:
These days, forty years later, everything is in a single unit, a Boss GT-100:
The pedal operates the wah-wah or whatever other deviant sound effect I've assigned to it and the echo / delay is activated with the blue button at the bottom.
There are distinct advantages to an all-in-one unit relative to a pedal board since the latter has multiple interconnections, multiple power connections, and can't be easily reconfigured in terms of the order the effects are processed. We don't go on beyond that since people get religious regarding the best solution. This one is my solution as was the GT-10 before that.
Summarizing the article does no service since much of it is in Casher's words and they're cool words. One day he was hanging about in his studio when someone knocked at the door. It was Frank Zappa. Yes, extremely cool words.
The Echoplex is one of the earliest tape loop delays but it's not the one Casher invented. This is the one I used and had a whale of time with it but analog days were drawing down and I haven't seen one of these in use in many years.
There was a large looping tape under the cover and that would accommodate about three minutes of my deathless jams. At the right moment, I could flip that over to playback and then wail freeform lead over the top of the chords. Even for that time, this was a radical device.
After Hendrix, everyone had to have a wah-wah and the Cry Baby wah-wah may have done the best since those were all over the place. I didn't see wah-wah as invoking any kind of musical devils since I had heard trumpeters from the swing bands getting a somewhat similar effect with a mute. I saw the wah-wah as an electronic extension of that and fitting for the new age.
It was a hugely popular device.
There wasn't much inside it:
These days, forty years later, everything is in a single unit, a Boss GT-100:
The pedal operates the wah-wah or whatever other deviant sound effect I've assigned to it and the echo / delay is activated with the blue button at the bottom.
There are distinct advantages to an all-in-one unit relative to a pedal board since the latter has multiple interconnections, multiple power connections, and can't be easily reconfigured in terms of the order the effects are processed. We don't go on beyond that since people get religious regarding the best solution. This one is my solution as was the GT-10 before that.
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