Morley Mini Bad Horsie 2

The Morley Mini Bad Horsie 2 is a compact wah pedal from Morley, sold as the Custom Shop Mini Steve Vai Bad Horsie 2 Wah. It is a smaller-footprint take on the full-size Bad Horsie 2, the second version of Steve Vai's signature wah, and it keeps the features that define that line: switchless operation and a variable Q control¹.

What it does

Like other Morley wahs, the Mini Bad Horsie 2 works without a bypass switch. As MusicRadar's buying guide puts it, "The main difference with Morleys is their action, where they activate when pressed and deactivate when released"³. You step on the treadle and the wah engages; you lift your foot and it drops out. There is no click to time and no switch to hit mid-phrase, which suits players who use wah in short bursts rather than leaving it on for a whole solo.

The pedal is also optical, using a light-based system rather than a mechanical potentiometer to read the treadle position, and it carries a Contour knob alongside its wah controls³. The Bad Horsie 2 circuit it is built from adds variable Q, which shapes how sharp or broad the wah's filter peak is: turn it one way for a wide, vocal sweep, the other for a narrower, more focused peak¹.

Where the standard Bad Horsie 2 sits in a full-size housing, the Mini version packs the same approach into a smaller steel enclosure, which saves board space for players running several pedals². The full-size Bad Horsie line has a character of its own among wahs: MusicRadar describes Steve Vai's signature Morley wah as having "a darker tone than the standard Cry Baby"³, so players comparing it against a Dunlop Cry Baby can expect a different voicing rather than a like-for-like swap.

Morley continues to build the Bad Horsie family around this design. The current 20/20 Bad Horsie Wah, for example, carries an MQ2 custom inductor, LED indication, a cold-rolled steel housing, a quick clip battery door and a glow-in-the-dark treadle grip⁴, keeping the switchless Bad Horsie formula in the maker's modern lineup.

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