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nickname009
Published on 01/01/12 at 01:58
This is the legendary whammy pedal that put digitech on the MAP! It also made a few guitarists super duper famous. I have the 4th revision of it. I don't know exactly what's different, maybe it tracks better and some of the parts for the build are a bit better? Also the casing is different in size, maybe smaller, not sure.
Definitely the dive bomb feature is new, don't know when they started putting that feature in but the whammy 4 definitely has it.
Whammy modes including famous 2 Octave Up as heard on 100's of songs!
10 Harmony Bend modes including 2nd Up to 3rd Up simulating pedal steel bends!
Expression pedal controls dive bombs and bends
Cutting-edge pitch detection engine designed specifically for guitar delivers fast accurate shifting!
MIDI In & Out/Thru to control pitch bends via cc's
UTILIZATION
Pretty simple to get any of those RATM sounds you've heard many many times before. Just stick to the 2 octave up setting, Tom uses that the most the last time I checked.
Overall, easy to setup, just simple plug it in and turn the knob to whatever setting you want to play around with and step on it and rock it back and forth to get crazy!
SOUND QUALITY
Sound quality here is hard to define exactly. For the tone purists this is a pedal to stay away from, it's not true bypass (though there are mods out there these days for that) nor does it really 'retain that original guitar sound' as it's kinda meant to warp it and shift it in pitch and do crazy things to your guitar sound. So those who have rigs or boards with nice boutiquey-truebypass-non tone-sucking setups, this'll probably negatively affect your signal chain.
But then again that's not the point of this pedal. It's designed to be the wild card in your rig! So coming into the game knowing that, you'll find yourself having a lot more fun with the sounds this pedal has to offer.
I actually really like the detune features both the deep and shallow they sound like convincingly good as a chorus-replacement! The dive bomb feature is also great. I used to play only floating bridge equipped guitars to do all the tricks but I've gotten sick of maintaining them and worrying about tuning stability etc so I've gone hard tail and with the whammy I can replicate the same ideas though of course they don't sound alike, the whammy makes it sounds more digital but I kinda like that!
OVERALL OPINION
To conclude this is actually the first whammy i've owned. I know so many players who have owned it before and sold it and bought it back again etc. Like I said it's the wild card in your pedalboard. Either you can find use for it or you can just use it for some fun tricks! I think it's quite worth having for what I do. I do a lot of cover songs especially Rage tunes, I also don't have a chorus pedal but with the whammy I now have 2 chorus settings to use. I also now only own fixed bridge guitars so I can't do the trem tricks, and yet again here's the whammy to cover those tricks for me! Pretty useful in my book.
Again it's not a great sound in terms of 'tone' it's digital-ish so you'd have to get over that, or mod it if you got the extra time and $$.
Definitely the dive bomb feature is new, don't know when they started putting that feature in but the whammy 4 definitely has it.
Whammy modes including famous 2 Octave Up as heard on 100's of songs!
10 Harmony Bend modes including 2nd Up to 3rd Up simulating pedal steel bends!
Expression pedal controls dive bombs and bends
Cutting-edge pitch detection engine designed specifically for guitar delivers fast accurate shifting!
MIDI In & Out/Thru to control pitch bends via cc's
UTILIZATION
Pretty simple to get any of those RATM sounds you've heard many many times before. Just stick to the 2 octave up setting, Tom uses that the most the last time I checked.
Overall, easy to setup, just simple plug it in and turn the knob to whatever setting you want to play around with and step on it and rock it back and forth to get crazy!
SOUND QUALITY
Sound quality here is hard to define exactly. For the tone purists this is a pedal to stay away from, it's not true bypass (though there are mods out there these days for that) nor does it really 'retain that original guitar sound' as it's kinda meant to warp it and shift it in pitch and do crazy things to your guitar sound. So those who have rigs or boards with nice boutiquey-truebypass-non tone-sucking setups, this'll probably negatively affect your signal chain.
But then again that's not the point of this pedal. It's designed to be the wild card in your rig! So coming into the game knowing that, you'll find yourself having a lot more fun with the sounds this pedal has to offer.
I actually really like the detune features both the deep and shallow they sound like convincingly good as a chorus-replacement! The dive bomb feature is also great. I used to play only floating bridge equipped guitars to do all the tricks but I've gotten sick of maintaining them and worrying about tuning stability etc so I've gone hard tail and with the whammy I can replicate the same ideas though of course they don't sound alike, the whammy makes it sounds more digital but I kinda like that!
OVERALL OPINION
To conclude this is actually the first whammy i've owned. I know so many players who have owned it before and sold it and bought it back again etc. Like I said it's the wild card in your pedalboard. Either you can find use for it or you can just use it for some fun tricks! I think it's quite worth having for what I do. I do a lot of cover songs especially Rage tunes, I also don't have a chorus pedal but with the whammy I now have 2 chorus settings to use. I also now only own fixed bridge guitars so I can't do the trem tricks, and yet again here's the whammy to cover those tricks for me! Pretty useful in my book.
Again it's not a great sound in terms of 'tone' it's digital-ish so you'd have to get over that, or mod it if you got the extra time and $$.