Thread: Wah before or after Fuzz / Drive?

Depend on my feelings, sometime I switch it, but I really love the sound of the Wah in first! Seem to me that there's more quack! I read somewhere that you have more than one wah so put one in front and one after your od/fuzz...problem solved! ;)

Originally Posted by Ti-Ron

Depend on my feelings, sometime I switch it, but I really love the sound of the Wah in first! Seem to me that there's more quack! I read somewhere that you have more than one wah so put one in front and one after your od/fuzz...problem solved! ;)

Last I looked I had three...maybe not a bad idea. An entirely wah board... :D

An age-old question. Wah after distortion is subtractive synthesis. Wah before distortion is additive synthesis. Wah after distortion is more focussed sounding and loses more bottom. Wah before distortion is more vocal sounding and loses less bottom.

The same relationship exists between distortion and virtually any effect that has a filtering component (autowah, phaser, Uni-Vibe). As far as I'm concerned it is about time that pedal-makers started producing distortions in chassis that would accommodate a send/receive loop and an order-flipper switch that would let you situate that distortion ahead of OR after the device/s of your choice.

My pedalboard is arranged wah>>drive (no seperate fuzz)>>octave>>tuner>>loop station. I'm using a Boss powered pedalboard and it's designed for the wah to go first in the chain.

I go Wah>Muff>some sort of 808 circuit pedal.

It depends on what I'm after. Sometimes I really like the subtle filter sweep sounds of a wah in the loop -- after all the drive stuff. And sometimes I really like the over-emphasized highs you get with a wah first in the chain. I have an example! On this track the filter-swept backing track has the wah in the loop, and the lead track has the wah in front of everything. I think I was using an FKR for overdrive on the lead track.

http://ian.coastpedalboards.com/soun...elay/demo4.mp3

All this indecision is what's driving me to design a box that lets me change the place of my ModFactor in my chain, from in front of my amp to in my effects loop, with the push of a button.

when i did use wah.. it went before the muff into od... i liked being able to stack fuzz w/ overdrive and i found my wah and muff behaved better together in this order.

Maybe its just me, or the amp or pickups I use, but I find there are some distortions that respond well to a wah, or even a guitar tone change, placed ahead of them, and others that seem to ignore the particulars of the signal you feed them. In some instances, you can change from neck to bridge or from tone wide open to full mute and you barely detect a change in the sound from the distortion. Similarly, in some cases you can wah your brains out, and the distortion registers that change in input signal as a marginally perceptible change in where the emphasis is.

I mention this because one can expect preferences and opinions to vary as a function of which distortion they are using. In some instances, either sequence (F->W or W->F) will produce an easily audible result, and the choice becomes one of aesthetic preferences (i.e., the kind of sonic change that order yields is one you like). In other instances, for whatever reasons (maybe source impedance sensitivity from the distortion), only one of the two choices is actually viable.