guitar wah > bass wah

[uethanian]

i bought a dunlop crybaby or guitar a while back, and i haven't really used it all that much. well, it was really before i started playing bass. now i know that there's an equivalent crybaby for bass, that i think sounds pretty cool. would it be possible to change the values in the guitar crybaby to make it bass friendly? like the capacitor value. i honestly dont know much about electronics, but the capacitor is what comes to mind.

[Im a sock]

I don't think so.

I had to buy a replacement jack for my Cry Baby Bass pedal from a company that sells Dunlop replacement parts. They had a replacement guitar wah circuit board that must have been 1/3 the size of the one in the bass version. It looks to me like there is more to it than just a capacitor.

If I were you I would buy the Cry Baby Bass. It's a great pedal.

[Geist]

I had a Crybaby for guitar a year or 2 ago - MAJOR tone sucker

I'd recommend either a Morley (for durability and great tone) unit, or if your not exactly sure what your looking for in a wah sound, the Ibanez Weeping Demon can't be beat. It's a great starter-wah pedal as you can customize your tone in any way you want.

[Mark Olson]

I'm no electronics expert, but the way I understand it is this: what causes the loss of bottom with a guitar wah pedal on bass is not a simple input/output capacitor. A guitar wah is basically a variable band pass filter, the center frequency of which is controlled by the treadle actuating the potentiometer, and as is the nature of band pass filters you will lose bottom. It's just the nature of the beast. So in order to retain the bottom with a wah pedal a completely different circuit than most guitar wah pedals is required. Also apart from that you may or may not want your wah pedal to sweep different frequencies with bass than with a guitar.

I've owned several bass and guitar wahs, good ones too, and I always get the best results on bass with a bass specific wah. As you can imagine, there is good reason why bass-specific wah pedals are made.

[uethanian]

well that makes sense i guess

i was just wondering, because i've tried it with my bass before and it had little effect. less effect than twisting the basses tone knob had. the bass presence was still there tho...

[JanusZarate]

Now, with other pedal types, like a lot of guitar distortion pedals, input/output capacitor changes can make a significant difference in low end. You'll see this brought up often, especially in regards to the old DOD 250 Overdrive pedals and other overdrive pedals that are "almost" bass friendly.

But generally... what it takes to make a pedal "bass friendly" depends on the type of effect you're dealing with. The capacitor change isn't a cure-all.

[svenbass]

I love my Original Crybaby for my bass. However, as Geist said, many would consider it a tone suck as it is voiced for guitar.

I made the decision after trying a bunch all in one sitting, and dug the frequency that it works at. All the bass specific ones sounded too messy for my needs.

[Mark Olson]

It is worth mentioning, George Porter, Jr. of the Meters used an old Crybaby guitar wah pedal. I even remember reading an interview with him where he claimed that his guitar crybaby didn't effect his bottom while the bass wahs he had tried did. This was a long time ago and I'm not sure what all he'd tried though.

[bleedingfingers]

Hello Mark
The only diffrence between a dunlop gcb95 guitar wah and a
gcb100 bass wah is the sweep capacitor the gcb95 has a 0.01uF and the gcb100 has a 0.068uF.

But they are both tone and gain suckers unless you mod
them and true bypass them .

Also as far as the circuit boards go theres about 4 or 5 types
maybe more depending on the age of the wah .

I have not modded a wah for bass but I have changed and
modded a bass wah for guitar and have 2 early 80's pedals that are identical except one is a gcb95 the other is a gcb100
their circuit boards are exactly the same .

hope this helps B.

[Mark Olson]

That's all well and good, but the GCB100 is probably the worst bass wah I've ever heard. I wouldn't take any properties of the GCB100 as indicative of the properties of any quality bass wah.

[bleedingfingers]

Like I said in my post they both suck unless there modded .

regards B.

[Mark Olson]

I'm not talking about gain or tone suck. The sound of the pedal just sucks. There are many far better bass wahs out there, that I daresay are more different from guitar wahs. Even a Snarling Dogs Bootzilla bass wah will beat the GCB100 by a mile in my book.

[bleedingfingers]

I totally agree

regards B,

[Sean S]

Originally Posted by uethanian

i bought a dunlop crybaby or guitar a while back, and i haven't really used it all that much. well, it was really before i started playing bass. now i know that there's an equivalent crybaby for bass, that i think sounds pretty cool. would it be possible to change the values in the guitar crybaby to make it bass friendly? like the capacitor value. i honestly dont know much about electronics, but the capacitor is what comes to mind.

For something similar to the modern Bass Crybaby, you'd need to split the signal before the wah circuitry with basically a fixed low-pass blend.

[WarriorJoe7]

get a 105q bass model. it's great