Here is a short history of the wah from Brad Plunkett who invented it When I was about 10 years old, I got an old short-wave radio from a neighbor. I was sitting out on the back porch and started listening to ham radio operators and radio Moscow and stuff like that. This was back in the early fifties, and I got very interested in radio. When I was 12 or 13, I got a ham radio license. Over a period of a couple years, I built some equipment of my own–very much the kind of thing that Bill Putnam did a few years earlier. He was a ham radio hobbyist, and as a matter of a fact Bill Jr. was too. The ham radio hobby led into me getting a job at a TV repair shop in the neighborhood where I lived in Van Nuys. I went in there when I was 13, and the guy said, “What can you do kid?” And I said, “Well, I can fix things.” So they gave me a job fixing car radios, and this was of course in the vacuum tube days and they paid me a dollar and a quarter for each radio I fixed, I think. That turned out to be a really good job for a 13 year old. Pretty soon I had worked through the entire stack of radios and they had to teach me how to fix televisions. So I did all that through high school and that was how I got my spending money. Toward the end of high school, I took a summer job at a company called Thomas Organ Company; they made electronic organs. There were a lot of people in our family that were musicians–not me, but everybody else in my family played an instrument. So I knew a little bit about music. I didn’t know much about electronic organs, but I learned there over a summer, then went back to school. Every summer I went back there. I had 10 years of electronics experience, even though I was only 20 years old. The job at Thomas got me involved in music, and somewhere around 1963 or ’64, the owner of Thomas made a deal with a company in England called Vox, who made guitars and amplifiers. Vox had a deal with the Beatles at that time to promote Vox guitars and amplifiers. I think that they’d been given some free equipment early in their career, and as I recall they had a five-year deal with Vox, which was very good for Vox. We were developing in addition to electronic organs, portable organs for rock ‘n’ roll. We were doing guitar amplifiers and guitars I guess. One day, my boss led me to a guitar amplifier that had a feature on it called “midrange boost.” It was a haystack equalization that you could move to four, five, six individual frequencies to change the tonality of the guitar amplifier. I think it was a Vox Buckingham but I’m not absolutely sure. His order was, “This rotary switch that we have for switching these frequencies on this equalizer is too expensive. I want you to take it out and figure out a way to replace it with a potentiometer. Up till that point, no one had really built a sweep equalizer, which is what the Wah Wah pedal really is. Brad Plunkett is the inventor of wah So I went back to my bench and thought about it for a while and talked to a friend of mine who was a somewhat expert on tunable oscillators and came up with a circuit that would allow me to move this midrange boost with a potentiometer rather than with the switch. As it turned out, it sounded absolutely marvelous while you were moving it. It was okay when it was standing still, but the real effect was when you were moving it and getting a continuous change in harmonic content. We turned that on in the lab and played the guitar through it–this friend that I worked with who played the guitar. I turned the potentiometer and he played a couple licks on the guitar, and we went crazy. Then the next problem was how do you operate the thing if you need to turn the potentiometer at the same time you are playing the guitar and you already have both hands occupied. As I said before, we were doing electronic organs at that time too, and there was a portable organ within my field of view that somebody else was working on and he’d gone out to have a cigarette. I saw the volume pedal, the expression pedal sitting on the floor underneath this portable organ and I said, “John, why don’t you go and grab that pedal and let’s put the potentiometer in there.” And so we did that, and in fact the Wah Wah pedal was built into the same piece of tooling that they had used for the expression pedals for portable organs up until that time. Anyway the thing took off like crazy. They sold millions of them.