Electro-Harmonix Talking Pedal

The Electro-Harmonix Talking Pedal is a rocking filter pedal that gives a guitar vowel-like, talking sounds. Like a wah, it is a rocking filter-type pedal, but instead of a single sweeping peak it passes the signal through two bandpass filters that give the tone a male vocal quality and a set of vowel sounds¹. A fixed fuzz circuit is built in, blended to taste with a scroll wheel on the side of the pedal². It was announced in 2012 as the second pedal in EHX's Next Step Effects line, carrying a U.S. list price of $121.20¹, and Premier Guitar later put street price at $95³.

How it makes vowel sounds

Where a wah moves one resonant peak around the spectrum, the Talking Pedal's circuit is built around two bandpass filters, which is what gives it a vocal, vowel character rather than a plain wah sweep¹. Premier Guitar's announcement described it as a dual formant filter that creates vowel-like sounds, the same idea behind the talk box effects popularized in the 1970s but achieved entirely in the pedal, no tubes required¹⁵.

Delicious Audio's reviewer, Gus Green, compared it directly to the classic effect:

He noted it generates a similar sound without the robot voice and consonant side sounds you get from a real talk box⁴. Electro-Harmonix's own product page pitches it as "Talkbox-like vocal expression without the hassles"².

The controls: rocking treadle and fuzz wheel

The Talking Pedal has almost no conventional controls. There is no footswitch and no potentiometer: the pedal is completely free of moving parts, including the pots and switches that can wear out on traditional pedals¹. Everything is done by rocking the treadle and turning one side wheel.

The chassis is a super-rugged unibody rounded on the bottom, so instead of pivoting on a mechanism like a traditional rocker pedal, the whole pedal rocks on its curved rubber bottom. Premier Guitar's reviewer found this actually feels more natural than the pivot mechanism of traditional rocker pedals³. The trade-off is that the pedal cannot rest in a fixed position, and attaching it to a pedalboard required a $13 Cradle add-on³.

Part of the Next Step Effects line

The Talking Pedal uses the proprietary design shared by all of Electro-Harmonix's Next Step Effects, and it was the second pedal released in the line²¹. The line's no-moving-parts rocking format was also used for wah pedals like the Crying Tone, which the 2012 announcement name-checked alongside the Talking Pedal as bringing vocal expression to the guitar player¹.

The talking-filter idea carried on in other EHX products after the Next Step line ended⁶:

• The Stereo Talking Machine, a programmable vocal formant filter with nine selectable voices, an expression pedal input, stereo output and an effects loop, discontinued in 2022⁶
• The Cock Fight and later the Cock Fight Plus, which moved the dual formant filter of the Talking Pedal, the circuit that creates the vowel-like sounds, into a traditional wah enclosure with a foot-controlled filter frequency⁵

What reviewers said

Premier Guitar's review was positive on both the filter and the fuzz. The reviewer found the formant filter tones rich and throaty, called the fuzz circuit an excellent addition, and praised the pedal as an exciting new take on pedal expression at a great price³. On test with the neck humbucker of a Gibson SG, the pedal "absolutely growled with overtones"³. The verdict:

The same review's cons list was short but real: the pedal cannot rest in a fixed position, and pedalboard mounting required the $13 Cradle add-on³. Delicious Audio's Gus Green echoed the build quality point, describing the unibody chassis and the no-moving-parts design, with the included 9V battery and optional AC adapter rounding out the package⁴.

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