What is a wah wah pedal?

[Punked Out Comp]

http://www.samash.com/catalog/showitem.asp?ItemID=23850&ItemType=10

What is this? What's it for?

[mbossman2]

you plug an electric guitar into it, strike a chord, step on the pedal (pump it a bit) and it adds a wah wah note to the chord (sound it out and think of a note and you'll get the idea)

[mairving]

A little tip is to go to Google and type in:
define wah wah pedal (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define+wah+wah+pedal). It gives you the definition of pretty much anything.

[Punked Out Comp]

What kind of music are they used in?

It looks like they are mostly in old music and jazz.

[jsawicki]

rofl thats a funny name. wah wah pedal. i thought you were joking when you said that.

[damontgo]

used mostly in funk actually... you'll hear it a lot in older red hot chili peppers songs.... it's a little bit like bending a note, only instead of bending a little bit, the pedal bends it in 1/2... hard to explain while not face to face

[nubbler]

used mostly in funk actually... you'll hear it a lot in older red hot chili peppers songs.... it's a little bit like bending a note, only instead of bending a little bit, the pedal bends it in 1/2... hard to explain while not face to face

Do you mean mouth to ear? :)

[mc2phat]

Wah pedals are and were used a lot in classic blues-based rock. Had a buddy played some mean blues licks, used a Crybaby wah pedal.

[spyder003]

Yeah blues guitarists use them a lot. That was one of Hendrix' main weapons. Stevie Ray used one a lot, and Melvin Taylor can really put one to good use.

[rjfvillarosa]

God I feel old :o I still have a "Crybaby" wah wah pedal, I haven't heard anyone utter that name in years.
Here's one for you techno guru's.
Back in the early seventies we had an echo machine called the "WEM copycat" and it was a loop of the old 1/2" magnetic tape that literally ran around and around across the record and playback heads in a continuous loop playing the recorded note and imediately recording a new note and replaying it again, there was an amazing control fitted to this machine which could speed up and slow down the rate of the echo by quite literally changing the speed of the drive motor, we thought it was fantastic state of the art stuff. How simple things were back in those days.
This is terrible I can even remember the day that Robert Moog released his first moog synthesizer for general sale. A friend of mine was a huge Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan and he was there on the first day ready to buy his "Moog Synthesizer" How Sad :(