Whammy Pedal Tips is a free lesson series by Masaki Watanabe covering all the ways you can use a whammy pedal. Masaki offers up some great insight, so be sure to subscribe for more lessons to come.

Putting a pedalboard together may be fun, but sometimes it takes way too long to get the perfect board not to mention knowing in what order all these pedals go! In this video I’ll share how I designed my current pedal board and pass along some useful tips.

I came up with a concept before building the board. Because I am using a Musicom EFXIII+, which is a programmable foot controller with 8 loops and MIDI, I had to decide what pedals go in each loop. So I decided to have all the gain stage effects in the first four loops and the all the time based effects in the second four loops. Take note: I left my rotary effect – a Lovepedal Pickle Vibe – out of the loop to have full control over it.

Of course I had to also consider was the placement of the Whammy pedal. I tried putting the Whammy before and after the distortion. I found there were two problems when putting it after. First issue was I had to have the loop that the Whammy pedal is on at all times, which didn’t give me the control over the pedal I was looking for. The other issue was when the pedal was on my tone drastically changed compared to when it was off and I lost the volume and the presence. However, putting a boost pedal in front of the Whammy didn’t alter my sound as much so that could be an option.

Sounds confusing? Don’t worry – just sit back and watch and I’ll explain everything 🙂

Thanks for watching the video and make sure you guys check out my website! Masaki Watanabe.

Gears Used:
Vigier Guitars
Ernie Ball Strings
Whammy pedal
Axe-Fx Ultra