The First Wah Pedal Demo Ever Made! (1967)

today's episode's going to be a little bit different i'm sitting here at the record time section because today is kind of a big giant record time but it's about the invention of a very special pedal the watt pedal so we're going to roll the intro and get with it [Music] i hold in my hands one of the hardest things to find that i've ever found it is the original 1967 vox wawa demonstrational record it's not a vinyl because it's actually made on cardboard there's perforated edges and it was torn out and it still plays yeah i i'm excited so i'm gonna play this just like i did with the world's first pedal demo with the maestro fz1 that's an episode you can go watch link below if you want to see it but we're going to play this and listen to it together and i'll comment if i think something's interesting but before we do this let's talk about the invention of the wall really briefly if you watched petals the musical you kind of saw the story dell casher and brad plunkett well let's go a little bit before that so vox is a company jennings in the uk charring crossroad they're there in london in mark street area and they create the ac15 ac 30 and some other products there's an engineer named dick denny and dick denny is the biggest deal and guitar still that a lot of people don't know about he invented those amps he invented the 816 booster which is probably where the fuzz face came from he invented tons and tons of amazing things and one of the things he invented was the vox super beetle amplifier so in 1964 70 million people watched the beatles on ed sullivan and vox went from being a mom-and-pop shop with mr jennings running it some employees and mr dick denny engineering into a full empire which included building an la hollywood area shop where they built things a big factory well it's interesting because dick built this super beetle ant they were capitalizing on the fact that the beatles used the vox amps on the ed sullivan show and in that amp is a mid control well in la there's a guy named del casher and he plays on movie soundtracks like or tv shows like green acres he also played on the lawrence welk show he's a pretty big deal kind of a les paul style character and he works for vox as an artist demonstration guy and then there's brad plunkett he's an engineer like dick denny but he's stateside and there's some other people but i won't get into the weeds basically brad plunkett is turning the control knob on a super beetle working on it and dell's in the other room and he hears the sound coming from that knob control dell runs in freaks out he's always heard this sound for the guitar and basically they take a vox continental organ volume control pedal here's one right here so this is a 65 model i think it's just a volume pedal you put one into the organ out and one out to your amplifier and yeah quiet loud they take that mid control circuit out of the amp and they put it into that enclosure i definitely remember going to stanley cutler head of engineering instead stan i know that this can be lifted out of the amplifier so can you get me the guy who did that he said well it was brad plunkett so i said tell brad i want the the breadboard put into the pedal so they had brad put it into the pedal on my request and what we have is the invention of the first huawei's this is one of the first 100 wahs ever made notice the sticker logos here really cool piece of history but that's how it came to be the wawa that's 1966 and in 1967 they go on to produce this product but there's a little bit of a problem when del casher gets brad to put the circuit into the enclosure and he has the effect of his dreams the vox people don't get it they think it's a product for trumpet players i'm really hoping that someone just put in the wawa trumpet sound because it's a horrible idea but trumpet was big at the time and guitar was still kind of who knows i played it for joe benaren and i said listen to the pedal now it really expresses all these sounds he said oh yeah but guitar players don't have enough money to buy a pedal but in the learn well lawrence welks orchestra they've got four trumpets they could all buy a pedal and the saxophone players would be five saxophone they'd all buy right there is nine pedals we can sell there's only one guitar player in florence walks orchestra i said no you don't understand joe dell's being sarcastic with the vox suits and he says yeah great idea just call clyde mccoy and slap his name on it well they do i remember my brother had a recording of a guy named clyde mccoy who had the trumpet of the sugar blues i said why don't you call clyde mccoy jokingly i figured clyde mccoy's was dead he wasn't he was still alive they call clyde mccoy they offer him 500 bucks to put his face on the back plate here we'll show a picture and the first ever production models are called the clyde mccoy and it's technically the first ever signature guitar pedal ever made just like i have the paul gilbert signature or many other brands have an artist's signature product well this was the first ever signature guitar pedal and it was for a trumpet player who was kind of washed up and never played guitar well all that said the wall became very popular but there was this problem right there in 67 dell wanted this to be a hit with guitar players but vox did not believe that it could be so del says i'm going to go to my hollywood hills studio in my garage and i'm going to cut a record with some friends and this is what he did and proof of how much vox didn't believe in the idea they only gave them a budget to put it on cardboard and there's not many of these left you listen to them they got thrown away instead of them putting on a vinyl record they put it on a piece of cardboard with plastic coating i thought this guy has no faith in the guitar wah pedal none he didn't want to spend the money for it and that's why nobody has heard it this is the evidence that vox did not think that the wah pedal would ever work for guitar but tell that to rage against the machine or kurt hammond i guess let's put the record on and listen to it it's an old cardboard record this is not going to be audiophile it hisses and crackles but we're going to we're going to pull some of the noise out it's just the experience of listening to a cardboard record that everyone in 67 was hearing i like to think that hendrix heard it this way i like to think that frank zappa heard the wah this way we don't really know but it's a really cool piece of history so let's check it out foreign my first thought is that's fairly annoying and you can tell they don't know what was gonna be they've never heard bulls on parade they've never heard shaft they've never heard any of that but dell had vision enough to know that this effect was really cool and different it's crazy to hear this and then think about how i use wah it is not this but this got us to where we like law to be now [Applause] [Music] [Applause] fox's fabulous new wawa pedal opens the door to a variety of great new sounds here's how it operates the guitar plugs into the wawa pedal with a standard cord then the pedal plugs into the app with another cord the entire foot goes on the pedal when the foot is rocked forward the guitar sound becomes sharp as the foot is rocked back the sound becomes mellow now we'll play a lick and slowly rock the foot forward going from mellow to shut [Music] by rocking the foot back and forth we get the huawei thing the same applies for chords the wawa pedal lets you go from mellow rhythm [Music] to sharply quickly and all without dropping a feet i will say my favorite use of the wah is that not how they played it but a wah is basically an inductor mid-range equalizer and you sweep it with your foot it's the dick denny circuit from the super beetle ant what's great is putting your wall before or after distortions i like it after and you can just mess with your tones of your dirt in a very interesting way i love having it back or toe down or leaving it in the middle some people call that a cocked wah like you would a gun ready to shoot it i love that fixed flaw sound and it's cool that they were noticing that right there dell kind of saw that maybe he didn't see it but he at least was headed into seeing it the way that i like to use it in action [Music] this is like acid surf music or something i don't quite know the genre it's la surf is huge we're not quite psychedelic del castro's playing theme songs for like tv shows and jazz it's a really strange genre i just want to point that out i'm not quite sure where this lies in the comments below what is the genre let's argue over that [Music] it's a little bright [Music] the wawa pedal lets you make your guitar growl wow [Music] [Applause] the wawa pedal used with distortion lets you make the wild sound of the east the sea time [Applause] [Music] and listen to the funky bass guitar sounds you get with the wawa pedal i think that's the batman song it's not the batman song bass wah i can't think of a single song with beiswa probably chili peppers but i can't actually think of it let me know that in the comments what's a baseball song did it ever translate [Music] brings a new sound of the 12 string [Music] this is funny because this is dell playing guitar by the way if i didn't make that clear this is actually the co-inventor dell playing guitar i went into my studio in hollywood hills got jimmy troxell drummer very great drummer through a lot of the sessions i said jimmy we're just going to lay we'll lay 13 tracks down one after another another and each track is going to be you know a minute and a half so out of the 13 songs i picked out about five songs to demonstrate the wah pedal and how the guitar can change the sounds and make it groovy make it growl make it funky make it sound like a sitar i i thought joe banner was going to you know say del casher young guitarist from hollywood featuring the wah pedal but they didn't now 12 string he's thinking i got to sell this product i got to convince people what's big at the time the birds stuff like that that whole that whole 12 string california thing was big as well if you own a 12 string and you've ever used wah i commend you because it's pretty baller [Music] the wawa pedal lets you play groovy or blues [Music] [Applause] foreign this is interesting from the interview i did with dell in 2019 setting in his living room i asked him the question are you aware that your creation was used by hendrix by clapton we're talking 6667. he was pretty oblivious to that and this is a 67 demo we've already heard the traces of what was about to do hendrick's second album track one has wah on it this is 67. so this is either right before or right as these mega guitar gods are using wah but it sounds like he's never heard it because when he says blues with wah he's playing more of a not that he's not playing what hendricks did he's not playing what clapton did and that's interesting to me probably just me i'm probably the only person that cares so forgive me for stopping the record for the tenth time [Applause] [Music] [Applause] my [Music] [Applause] [Music] you've just heard only a fraction of the incredible effects you can make with vox's fabulous new wawa pedal make your own new and exciting sound play box's new wawa pedal it's just one more sound reason why fox is what's happening to music [Music] guitar [Music] listen to the musical [Music] that was an interesting outro song um again this is a weird year you hear them trying to complement a coming hippie thing and also like the beatles on november the 16th 1966 at around 5 15 p.m when everybody was ready to go home i played it for job and aaron specifically and that's when we discussed what the future of the wawa pedal could be this an accidental creation that is the circuit from a super beetle ant pulled out of the amp because a man named del casher who's still alive um wanted it thrown into the vox continental volume controller so he could go wawa with his foot i remember he told me james brown even told him it was pointless and it wouldn't be cool that's ironic it's the first artist signature pedal ever and the artist was not a guitar player and he was simply paid 500 bucks as a pedal manufacturer my tip to you is when you see an artist's signature pedal make sure they actually play the pedal it's been known over time that certain companies would put things out and the person doesn't even play them a lot of lessons here a lot of cool stories i like this term vox it's what's happening if we pull this off this was their slogo slogo this was their logo vox it's what's happening just uh by sheer providence i had purchased this off of the bay fleabay it's an original 1967 vox rules it's what's happened in pin you can stab your enemies with it or wear it around town i have these two really cool pieces of vox ephemera i'm very proud of them i hope you enjoyed this and that's really it let's do a record time inside this episode which is essentially a record time it's going to be like inception here we go today's record time is brought to you by a band that's associated with this when i first sought after this the only thing i had ever heard is a youtube clip where someone pulled uh this a different version of this there's still a mystery there there seems to be two versions of this but this is the actual cardboard because i'm holding it in my hand this is what dell referred to but then there's a vox radio spot and this radio spot is from 67 and if you go on youtube right now we can link it below um go on youtube you're on youtube link below it's the electric prunes it says the vox wawa it's what's happening and the electric prunes is a band that is demonstrating the product well it turns out that del casher is actually a secret guitar player on these records with an actual band called the electric prunes i found these in hollywood when i was there to interview dale just so happened i'd never seen any electric friends records but go check them out it's an interesting uh nod to the era listen to that demo it's pretty cool it's it's a little more what you're used to possibly when it comes to wah with a band when you hear the electric prince demo but check out these records underground is cool i had too much to dream last night and this is one of the most interesting ones electric prunes mass and f minor i cannot figure out i think this is actually like catholic hymns i'm almost positive anyway check out the electric prunes really cool kind of a psychedelic band caught in an era between genres changing yeah check it out let me know what you think thanks so much for watching this i hope you enjoyed it it's a little bit different but sometimes you got to do something different so that everything's not the same just hit like subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications of every future episode have a wonderful day there is the ghs show.com where you can find shirts and other things that you might like and there's also a patreon link in the description below if you like this kind of stuff i've done a ton of this style of talk over on patreon so go be a member five bucks a month that's like half of a coffee right is that right coffees are like 10 bucks right just do it bye you

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 120,969

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer

Id: DioNXWlUZQk

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021