Today I want to discuss one of the easiest upgrades that you can do to your Crybaby Wah pedal. The model that I am going to do this mod on is Crybaby GCB-95. Historically, when Vox came up with the idea for a wah pedal, their secret weapon was this little inductor that made an unbelievable difference in the tone and changed the world of rock and roll forever. That little secret is the Fasel Wah Inductor. You can get them in 2 colors (red - this is more modern sounding with a bit more bite on the high end, and yellow - these are more vintage sounding, reminisent of the McCoy's.) Both are a great upgrade to the standard inductor that come in your run of the mill Crybaby Wah. Best of all, this upgrade only costs about $20.00. That's not bad when you consider the difference that this little inductor makes. For this article, I will explain the "how to" version for swapping this little magical tone devise. It really does not matter what color you decide to go with, both of them are great upgrades to your basic wah pedal. I personally prefer the yellow, but that is just what works best for my style of playing and absolutely by no means better than the red version. You may find that red suits your style better if you know what I mean. The whole thing takes less time to do than to actually drink a cold beer, and that sounds like an excellent idea. First of all let's go over the things that you will need to do this simple mod.
- Phillips head screw driver - this is for taking the little rubber feet off so that you can get to the insides of the wah pedal. Pretty simple (lefty loosy, righty tighty) You will use this again to remove the PCB board on the inside of the wah.
- Soldering iron - you will use this to remove the old inductor and install the new one. I would also recommend putting the medium or fine tip on to do this work as well.
- Remove the back plate to access the inside of the pedal. You will do this by removing the 4 rubber feet on the bottom of the pedal. This is where that lefty loosy, righty tighty thing comes into play.
- Put the pedal in front of you so that the battery is closest to you. The PCB board should be directly above this. Make sure to remove the battery at this point.
- You now want to remove the PCB board. There will be 2 phillips head screws holding the PCB board down. Remove these. The next thing is to remove the wiring harness connection. It will be located on the top right hand side of the board. When you get the PCB board out, you will notice a brown or black inductor toward the top left hand side of the board. This is what we are going to remove. It should look like this.
If you flip the PCB board over, you can see where the connections are soldered onto the PCB board. There will be 4 leads coming off of the inductor and soldered to the board. Get a pretty good grip on the inductor ( I would wear leather gloves if you have them, it gets pretty hot pretty quick ) and take your soldering iron and start heating where the leads are coming through the board it self on the other side. Now, pay attention to what you are doing and continue to rotate around the 4 connections with the soldering iron. You must be careful not to overheat one particular lead on the board because you will end up burning the board up, and that is not a good thing. As you rotate around the 4 connections, you will notice the inductor starting to loosen up. Gently pull as you are heating to remove the inductor, and you should be left with 4 holes. You will notice that 2 holes are not going to anything on the board, and you will also notice that the new inductor that you are going to put in only has 2 leads. This is ok because that's all you need to hook it up. Now that you have taken the old inductor out, you can now install the new Fasel inductor. Just be careful with the amount of heat from the iron, because as I mentioned before, it doesn't take much to burn up the board. It's basically the same process in reverse, and when you get done it should look a little like this. Now all you have to do is to put the PCB board back in with the 2 screws, re-insert the wiring harness plug, re-install the battery and then put the plate back on with the rubber feet, and you are ready to rock and roll. My next post will be taking this same pedal and making it a true by-pass. Thanks to Jimbagodonuts for the photo's and the experimental pedal to use for this post.
**If you have any questions about the tips in this blog, or would like to see a post about something we haven't covered, please email us at:guitarguruguys@gmail.com
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