The Vox King Wah is a vintage wah pedal from Vox, part of the same family of wahs as the Vox V846 Wah Wah and the earlier Vox Wah Wah. Its claim to a place in the company's history is where it was built: according to Eric Kraft, Geoffrey Teese and Mike of Analog Man Vintage guitar effects, when Vox came out with the King Wah it was "the first unit made completely in the United States," whereas early King Vox Wahs came from Italy1.
What it does
Like other wahs of its era, the King Wah sweeps a filter across the guitar's frequencies with the rocker pedal, giving the familiar vocal "wah" effect used across blues, funk and rock. It belongs to the family of circuits covered on the site's Wah-Wah Pedals page.
On how it sounds, the Analog Man page is direct. Eric Kraft, Geoffrey Teese and Mike write that "The American Vox V846 and King Vox Wah sound good but lack the range and richness of tone of the others, probably due to" the inductor and capacitors used in them1. In other words, in the view of that source, the King Wah is a good-sounding wah that does not reach the tonal range and richness of the other Vox wahs they compared it with, and they point to its inductor and caps as the likely reason.
That matters to a player shopping the vintage Vox wah market: the King Wah's historical interest, as the first US-built Vox wah, sits alongside a tonal character that this source ranks below its Italian-built relatives. Players chasing that richer, wider sweep in a modern hand-wired form may want to compare it with the Vox V846-HW, or with Vox's later recreations of its first wah pedals such as the Vox VRM-1 Real McCoy and the Vox V846 Vintage.
Videos
spoonido
Grant Higgins
村一番のギターチャンネル
Sources (1)
- Wah Wah Pedal article, Analog Man Vintage guitar effects (analogman.com), 2015
