WH-1 Whammy

Effect Pedal

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On a beautiful spring Friday night sometime during my junior year of high school, some friends and I were at a school event. We were watching some of our peers in a band playing these songs I didn’t recognize. I really liked the songs, but moreover, those guys playing the instruments looked like they were having so much fun. It was an epiphany. It made me want to learn how to play guitar.

Back in school the next week, I learned that those songs were by a band called Rage Against the Machine. Their self-titled first album had just come out, so I bought the CD. I cracked it open, pulled out the liner notes, put the CD in my Sony stereo, and everything was different. I had never heard anything like it. If that CD had grooves like a vinyl record, I would have worn them out.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a high octane combination of politically charged rap, Black Sabbath-style riffs, and just these really weird sounds, like a DJ scratching on turntables. But those liner notes said there was no DJ. Not even any samples.

“Wait, so this was a guitar making these sounds?”

My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. Trusty stompboxes that adorn the floor in front of millions of guitar players, whether in a bedroom full of big dreams, or on a stage in front of big crowds. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds. I’m going to focus on some historically important ones for this project.

For the uninitiated, an effect pedal is usually a small box that sits on the floor, with some electronics that modify the sound of a musical instrument. But beyond all that, effect pedals open up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.

“So this was a guitar making these sounds?” Yes. There is a laundry list of techniques that Rage guitarist Tom Morello pioneered to make these DJ scratching sounds. He would unplug his guitar cable, which was still plugged into his amplifier, and touch the plug to the jack of his guitar and make a sound. He would rapidly flick the pickup switch on his guitar while sweeping his hand or a metal slide up and down the strings. Those were just two of these techniques. But this is a podcast about effect pedals. And there was one pedal that was instrumental to all of this: the Digitech Whammy Pedal.

First released in 1989, the Whammy was the first widely-available effect pedal to control pitch shifting with your foot. Many guitars have something called a whammy or vibrato or tremolo bar, which players use as a pitch shifter. Think Eddie Van Halen on “Eruption” on the first Van Halen album. The Whammy pedal enabled players to shift and bend pitches with more range and nuance than you could with just the whammy bar, and that opened up a lot of possibilities. Also, heavy use of the whammy bar can cause the guitar to go out of tune, unless you have a special tremolo apparatus to lock the strings in place. The Whammy pedal enabled players to do all of this dive bombing and pitch shifting without going out of tune.

The Whammy pedal counts many A-list players as devotees, like Tom Morello, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, Jack White, and the late Dimebag Darrell from Pantera. The original WH-1 pedal was discontinued in 1993, but it was revived as the Whammy II in 1994. The current 5th generation version is the pedal that you are hearing now.

As for Tom Morello, yes, a guitar was making these sounds, with the help of a Ferrari red Whammy pedal and a lot of innovation. I was too young to have heard Van Halen’s first album when it came out in 1978. As the story goes, people were blown away and baffled by how Eddie Van Halen could sound the way he did. “Wait, so this was a guitar making these sounds?” They could barely believe it was a guitar making those sounds. For me, that first Rage record was my Van Halen I.

The lesson in this for me as a young guitar player, in my bedroom, playing along to that Rage Against the Machine CD in my stereo, was that there is always something new to try, some new sounds to explore. In the 90s, guitar playing was ripe for disruption, and I’m glad to have witnessed it. Even thirty years later, guitar playing is ripe for disruption all over again. I didn’t have a Whammy pedal back then, but I do have one now. The lesson in this for me as an older guitar player, with that Rage Against the Machine CD permanently imprinted on my brain, is the same: there is always something new to try, some new sounds to explore.

For a t-shirt or an art print featuring the DigiTech Whammy WH-1 pedal, visit the website: EffectPedalProject.com. Want to hear songs that have a Whammy pedal in them? Check out the playlist on Spotify, or in the show notes for this episode at the website.

Effect Pedal is a MeteorWright production, hosted and produced by me, Wright Seneres. If you like what you heard here, please subscribe to the podcast. Consider getting the Effect Pedal email newsletter in your inbox too, for extra fun Effect Pedal content. The show is on social media at @EffectPedal. You can find links to all this good stuff at EffectPedalProject.com. Theme music is “Lucky Day” by the Meritocracy. Special thanks to Alice Seneres and Tony Whalen.

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