Vox wah pedal

The Vox wah pedal is the foot-controlled filter that sweeps a band of treble and bass across your guitar as you rock the pedal, producing the vocal "wah" sound heard on countless records since the late 1960s. Vox introduced the original Wah-Wah pedal in 1967, and the company still builds wahs around that design today, from the affordable V845 to the Real McCoy Wah, which Vox calls "The Holy Grail"¹².

Where the wah came from

Vox's own account is that the Wah-Wah pedal was introduced in 1967 and "stemmed from the Midrange Boost feature of a VOX amp design." It was initially marketed to emulate the trumpet mute technique of Clyde McCoy, the jazz trumpeter whose name the original pedal carried. As Delicious Audio put it in a review of a Clyde-style pedal, "The original Vox wah pedal that Hendrix made famous actually strove to emulate McCoy's ability to make his trumpet cry."²⁶

The circuit kept evolving through the decade. Vox notes that the VOX Wah introduced in 1968 "also adopted carbon film resistors," which by the late '60s became standard on the design².

The current Vox wah lineup

Vox sells several wahs that trace back to the 1967 original, each aimed at a different player²⁶:

What reviewers have said

How a Vox wah fits a pedalboard

A wah is a filter effect, related to the pedals covered on the Wah-Wah Pedals type page, and it usually sits early in the signal chain, before drives and fuzz pedals, where it reacts most naturally to the guitar's own signal. Vox's own range shows how the same basic circuit has been stretched: the V847 stays closest to the '60s specification¹, the Real McCoy models chase the earliest versions outright², and the Big Bad Wah adds a second voice for players who want more than one wah sound⁷.