Ernie Ball 6185 Wah Pedal

A Wah pedal is a wah pedal, and then again not. They each have their own quirks and this one is cut out of a solid block of aluminum, making it almost unbreakable, even under enormous stress on or off stage.
As with all other wah pedals, you get a seriously simple circuit, with an input and an output jack. Like with the Crybaby GCB95, that really laid the foundation for the wah pedals, the simplicity is to be admired.

UTILIZATION

Should you feel the need to point out who invented the plug and play principal, then it has to be Dunlop. Ernie Ball chose to go by this principal as well - good for them!
You plug in you cords, give it some power and bam - you'r up and running.
However! Getting the right sound out of this kind of effect does take some time and practice. Granted, some require longer then others.

SOUND QUALITY

A wah pedal often tend to be either muddy in heel position or to bright in full out toe position. This is not the case with the Ernie Ball edition. Somehow, they manage to keep a clear sound all the way through the wah pedal's sweep range. It may be due to the Soft 12º traveling with the kevlar drive. But I'm not sure.
I've often experienced, that the wah has a certain point, where it "falls over", i.e it goes from being just pass the muddy part to being almost extremely bright (to bright). It's like the whole mid range part of the sweep, where the guitar really comes to its right, is gone.
That's not the case with this wah though.

I've found, that when running this wah in my setup, I really like to throw in a fast compressor right after, to take out the transient peaks from the wah.

OVERALL OPINION

In the world of wah pedals, it's either hit or miss. This time, it's a hit! For the price, that's maybe on the rather pricy end, you get a really great wah pedal, that's transparent enough, to leave you a clean wah signal (that might sound a bit wrong, but hear it, and it's right!) to make it sound good throughout the whole sweep range.
The reliability is really great, because of the aluminum chassis, so if you find that this is the pedal for you, you won't need to buy a replacement any time soon. The only thing that's in danger of breaking, is the string pulling the pot underneath.

This is a standard wah pedal, made by Ernie Ball. It can't be edited using a computer, and it's not MIDI-ready. It's an analog pedal and it's not rackable.

UTILIZATION

The cool thing about this, unlike some good wahs, is that you don't have to take off the back to put the batteries in, and there's also an adapter feature. It's not every day you see that, and it saves a lot of time. It's the basic wah pedal, so it's easy enough to manage, just rock the pedal back and forth and click to bypass. The manual explains it all.

SOUND QUALITY

This is an interesting wah pedal, not the most obvious or generic-sounding one I've ever heard. In fact, one of the noticable things about it is that it manages to make everything pretty clear without getting too bright. This is an issue for me with wah pedals, as I either find them too muddy or too bright. Although this might not be quite bright enough for me, it's refreshing to not pierce your eardrums every time you lean too far on a wah. A great thing is that when you bring it down really far, and filter out all the higher frequencies, you aren't muddying up the signal to no end. I can't always say that about my Vox wah, even though I love that thing. It's not the most transparent wah out there, but it's not too bad. I like it with my clean Strat sounds and the dirty ones, and really think the Les Paul with the gain cranked is a great sound.

OVERALL OPINION

This is a great wah pedal. Wahs seem to be either good or bad, and this one's definitely good. I think it's not too expensive ($150 or so), so the value is overally pretty good. The fact that you don't have to fiddle in the back means I probably won't be breaking anything anytime soon, which is also a plus. I would highly recommend this one for functionality and reliability.