This is what a wah pedal sounds like connected the wrong way around

[Jemusic]

Genre

Ambient

So in the very early 70's Dave Gilmour discovered by accident what happens when you connect a wah pedal the wrong way around eg the guitar plugs into the output of the pedal and the input of the pedal is connected to an amp. It goes into a self oscillation mode creating these high pitched whale like sounds. The strings do nothing but moving the pedal does and also pickup selection, the volume and tone controls on the guitar can have a profound effect on this sound also. Dave used it on the track 'Echoes' from the Pink Floyd 'Meddle' album. It happens around the 11 min 30 sec mark.

I have created a quick ambient piece here to illustrate. I have added a long delay and reverb and also the pad sound is from the Lunacy Audio 'Beam 2' plugin which is quite seriously out of this world. Beam is generating the pad sounds from the input signal that you are feeding in.

The switch when you push down does a full bypass so the guitar ends up going to the amp as normal. Not all wah pedals make the whale sounds when in wah mode but the more vintage ones do. The Dunlop Cry Baby which is what I used here certainly does. The guitar electronics or equivalent circuit ends up on the output of the wah pedal and probably sets it into motion. Obviously some of this signal feeds back to the input socket hence providing an output. Its very hard to control and you will never do the same thing twice either!

I start with a normal sound but switch into this mode around the 1 min mark. The weird sounds at the end is just guitar in normal mode and me messing with the pick etc..

 

[Craig Anderton]

That's cool! In the world of "doing things wrong," you might enjoy getting a hardware graphic equalizer and feeding the output back into the input. Moving the sliders causes oscillations at various frequencies.