Broughton Audio Broughton Joshwah

The Broughton Audio JoshWah is a combination envelope filter and fuzz pedal, a single unit where the two effects meet and, as Bass Musician Magazine's reviewer put it, "all kinds of cool and weird things happening at the intersection" of them¹. It sits in the wider family of filter pedals, alongside Broughton's dedicated filter units such as the Low + High Pass Filter and the State Variable Filter.

What it does

The JoshWah is built on a low pass filter (LPF) topology. As designer Josh Broughton explained, "The LPF topology retains all of the lows while giving a wide ranging sweep of the mids and highs"¹. For a bass player, that means the filter sweep works on the upper part of the sound without thinning out the fundamental, which is where many envelope filters fall down on bass.

The pedal covers a wide tonal range. Bass Musician Magazine's review found it "capable of producing familiar clean envelope filter sounds with a fast release time, as well as full on fuzzed out synthy tones dripping with distortion"¹. In practice, that spans from a classic auto-wah style quack, in the territory of a dedicated wah pedal, to saturated synth-like textures closer to what players reach for from fuzz pedals or synth pedals.

The controls

The Sense knob sets how the envelope filter responds to playing dynamics. According to the review, "The Sense knob gives a wide range of sensitivity for practically any bass"¹, so it can be dialed in whether the input signal is hot or quiet.

The deeper design point is how the knobs interact. As the reviewer put it:

That interactivity means the JoshWah rewards experimentation: a change to one control reshapes what the others do, which is where the pedal's range of clean filter and fuzzed-out sounds comes from¹.