Best wah pedals

This is the pedal that defines the category, and buying it means you are not guessing at what a wah is supposed to sound like. Dunlop publishes the red Fasel inductor and the die-cast housing, and the treadle-actuated switch at the toe end is the mechanism that has survived unchanged for decades because it works.

The full-size treadle is a real advantage over the mini versions: more travel means finer control over where in the sweep you stop, and stopping mid-sweep to park the filter as a fixed mid boost is a technique the shorter treadle makes harder.

The cons are two, and one of them is serious. It is not true bypass, so it is in your signal path when it is off — in front of a vintage-style fuzz, that changes the fuzz. The housing also takes roughly the footprint of two compact pedals, and no power supply is included. Dunlop publishes no electrical data at all, so you cannot budget a supply output for it without measuring.

Half the size of the standard Cry Baby, with a Fasel inductor and — critically — true bypass switching, which makes it the only pedal on this page that stays out of your signal path when it is off. On a board that also carries a vintage-style fuzz, that single specification decides the purchase.

The three internal voicings are Low, Vintage and GCB95, so you can set it to the standard sound and forget it, or move it darker. Getting three characters out of one enclosure at this footprint is genuinely useful on a board where the wah is the biggest thing on it.

The cons: the voicings are set with an internal switch, so changing one means opening the pedal — this is not a front-panel control, and you will pick one and leave it. The shorter treadle also gives less travel, which makes precise parking harder. As with the standard, Dunlop publishes no electrical figures.

VOX states the inductor was redesigned to sit closer to the original Vox wah specification, which is the reason to consider this over the Dunlop: it is a different voice rather than a cheaper version of the same one. The separate INST, AMP and DC jacks and the published 102 x 252 x 75 mm footprint make it straightforward to plan for.

VOX also publishes over 100 hours of continuous battery use on a manganese battery. That is the longest figure on this page and unusual to see published at all.

The con is the buffered input, and it is not a small one. VOX states the buffer preserves the unprocessed tone when the pedal is off, which answers the tone-suck complaint — and a buffer in front of a vintage-style fuzz removes the pickup interaction that lets the fuzz clean up on your guitar volume. If you run a Fuzz Face, this is the wrong wah unless it goes after the fuzz. Fuzz and buffers is the page for that.

We are not picking this, and the reason is specific to wah rather than general. For most effects, the argument that your multi-effects unit already has one is a real argument against a dedicated pedal. For wah it mostly is not.

A wah is a filter you sweep with your foot in real time. An HX Stomp models the filter well — that part is not the problem — but it has three footswitches and no treadle, so making the model usable means buying an expression pedal and a TRS cable. At that point you have spent wah money on something that is not a wah, and taken up the board space anyway.

The exception is a player who already owns an expression pedal for volume or for delay mix. If the treadle is on the board for another reason, assigning wah to it costs nothing. Best multi-effects covers the units themselves.