OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley, and today we're going to be looking at the Ibanez WD7 or the Weeping Demon. The Weeping Demon is a variable wah. It's part of the Tone-Lok Series and was introduced in 2004. As part of the Tone-Lok Series of effects, it's housed in this pretty heavy-duty die-cast aluminum casing. It can take some pretty serious abuse. Also, as part of the Tone-Lok Series, it's got these little lockable parameter knobs so you can sort of set the pedal as you like it, lock the parameter in place. You don't have to worry about sort of kicking them out of place or kicking them off the pedal entirely.

This wah functions in two modes. There's footswitch mode. In that mode, the footswitch on the side here engages the effect or turns it off. The other mode, if you flip this big lever here, is auto-switch mode. This basically turns the effect on when your foot is on the pedal, a lot like the Morley Bad Horsie wahs.

All right, so let's hear how this thing sounds. Okay, so let's start off with all of the controls on the wah at neutral and the wah in footswitch mode. So, I'm going to turn on the footswitch to turn it on. First control here is a level control, so you can actually use this as a little bit of a clean -- not a clean but a volume boost to sort of overly drive an amp. So here we are sort of in the middle here.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

If we boost our volume...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

We get a little overdrive there. Now, this next knob is really what sort of gives this wah its character. It's the Q knob. The Q knob basically controls how intense the filter sweep effect is. If we make it very subtle, you'll end up with a very subtle wah effect.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

And if we crank it, the mid range sweep becomes very pronounced. We get a very different sounding wah pedal.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

The last control here is a bass EQ, so we can just kind of pump the bottom end just to add more variation to the sound of the wah.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

So, you can get a lot of different sounds out of this wah. So let's take it off footswitch mode and put this back to neutral. Now, when the wah is in footswitch mode, the nice thing about it is that you can kind of leave it in one of its mid positions and just get sort of a mid range boost or like have it act basically as an EQ, which is what Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of Steely Dan used to do. Remember him, kids?

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

It's something you can't do when the pedal is in auto-wah mode. The auto-wah mode is a much quicker way of engaging the effect if you're in the middle of live performance. When you're not stepping on it, it is off.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

So there you go. Now, this last little switch on here is a range switch. You can switch it to low, and you'll hear the sound is very different.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

That's because this pedal doubles as a bass effect. So, why don't we try it out on a P-Bass? So now we've got our Weeping Demon hooked up to a P-Bass. As you can see, I've got my level control right at zero here. I've brought my Q control up to sort of intensify the wah effect. I've got my bass EQ pumped up a little bit, and our range switch is set to low here. So, for all intents and purposes, this is now a bass wah pedal. Let's listen to our dry signal first.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON BYPASSED]

Now, let's kick on the bass wah.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS WITH THE IBANEZ WD7 WEEPING DEMON ENGAGED]

Pretty funky. So, that was the Ibanez WD7 Weeping Demon Wah Pedal. This is Owen O'Malley, and thanks very much for joining us on Gearwire.Com and we'l[l see you next time.