non guitarist style wah use

use a wah not like a guitarist?
well, the only way that i know to use a wah is fast wah, slow wah, treble to bass wah, bass to treble wah, and keeping the wah in one place as a filter or sorts...but i know all guitar players (and any other instrument for that matter) have used all these techniques...
my thoughts are, if it doesn't sound right, don't do it...think about the song...

 

Its all wah to me.

Hmm well the only "non-conventional" ways I can think of is wah with distortion, mind you thats pretty convential nowadays anyways haha. Check out Cliff Burtons bass solo Pulling teeth (Anesthesia) (he uses it to get an almost "muffled" effect and then goes on the treble side to make it jump out) and also listen to Calm Like a bomb by rage agaisnt the machine, the bass player gets a really growly-wah sound plus the song has a sweet bass intro (although no wah its still cool ).

 

Could you elaborate on these? I'm curious too.. More specifically the treble -> bass, and bass -> treble. Using the wah normally will do bass - > treble right? Is the other technique when you have the wah pedal all the way in, and then release it as your playing the note(s)?

 

full bass side gives big boomy "dub" style sound.

Stopped mid way and piped through a fuzz tears the heads off of the front five rows of punters.

Full treble is... well... pretty useless if you ask me!

I sometimes use it in a build up, kinda hard to do though. Start at full bass, and ever so slowly bump it up over the course of 8 or 16 bars until it's midway (but not so far as to suck the bass response out of the tone!)

Guitarists tend to "overextend" when using wahs - going from full bass to full treble and back again in 0.02 seconds flat! I mostly sit mine midway and do very slight rocks back and forth.

Oh yeah, and stick it after a tremolo and freak out the establishement!

 

I have a riff or two with my Dunlop Bass Wah where I release it in segments, in time (one long release) over a measure or two and use its cut-off effect to create a rhythmic pattern. This works for me with open strings/open + octave.

 

yes...thats what i meant

 

yeah i also mostly use a wah rocker in a slow release over several beats...

.....but guitarists do that too all the time

 

Going heel to toe while sliding up and toe to heel while sliding down on your bass always sounds interesting. If you can twitch your foot really fast, you can get some very cool tremolo sounds. Don't need to move it much for that, just a bit. Doing that along with an actual tremolo... Does get fun

Also, the Dunlop 105q gives a little "pop" when you take your fot off the pedal, due to the auto-off feature. Most people hate it, but I can get some funky stuff going with it... Just mess around.

-Dash

 

I sometimes use wah + distortion + flanger, and man does that combination scream!

 

stick a spring under the toe end of the wah, then it will pop back to the heal posistion as soon as you take your foot off of it. also you can go really fast doing this. or if you have 2 wahs hooks them up with a board across them so one is going heal - toe and the other is going toe - heal (never tried this one, but i think that it would be interesting.)

lowsound