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Morley Steve Vai Bad Horsie 2 Contour Wah
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Morley Steve Vai Bad Horsie 2 Contour Wah
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« Less quack more filter »

Published on 07/20/11 at 13:27
The Morley bad horsie 2 is A twist on the classic wah pedal design.It has the standard 1/4 inout and output jacks, a battery door on the bottom for a 9volt, 9 volt dc jack, and a switch to activate the contour controls.

It is also switchless so it turns on as soon as you step on the pedal and turns off when you remove your foot. There is an internal trim pot to adjust the time it takes to activate and bypass.

UTILIZATION

Setting this pedal up is no different than a normal wah pedal with the exception of the internal trim pot. The manual explains where to find it and how to adjust it. I find it best with a minimal response time but some people may prefer it to not instantly turn off. It is easy enough to adjust so you can see what works best for you.

SOUND QUALITY

I used this pedal in a guitar set up but my bassist seemed to like it on bass as well. Unfortunately for him the rest of the band thinks wah on bass is a terrible idea. This pedal has what Morley calls "clear tone buffer circuitry" what that means is that there is a buffer in the pedal that is always in your signal chain even when the pedal is bypassed. It is supposed to help drive long cables and it seemed to do that. I never had a problem with the buffer except when the pedal was near a noise source, like bad power adapters, it would boost the amount of noise in my rig. It was not too much of a problem but made placement of my power strip something that had to be considered for minimal noise. In general the pedal was a bit more noisy than I would like but it was intermittent. Some days I would have no problem and others it would hiss. It's just picky about things like power and placement

The wah itself I found to be more of a smooth filter than the standard quack of an old dunlop. Playing with the contour controls could get you closer to the funk territory but I preferred using it for slow sweeps. Having the auto on feature made this even better as you can start the pedal at the heel down position instead of it immediately being int he upper register. I have always been a fan of synth sweeps and this pedal allowed me to somewhat simulate that when placed after a dense fuzz box.

OVERALL OPINION

The occasional noise issue is what eventually led me to sell this pedal. I was running a pretty large pedal board at the time and I'm sure that added to the problem. I never had any issue with the pedal when it was on it's own on the floor. The sound is not traditional so if you are looking for that old school Hendrix sound you may want to look elsewhere. If you don't run a large board that adds up noise and want more of a filter than a quack I suggest trying this pedal out. There aren't many other switch less wah pedals out there and the only one I found that I liked more is the silver machine. The silver machine is much more expensive.