Dunlop Mr. Crybaby Super Volume Pedal

All right, it's a wah pedal ... press down hard for wah, L.E.D. comes on, convulsively swivel your foot, press hard again to disengage, and volume effect comes back. Obviously, you can see how difficult this is ;)

Only thing I don't love is that the volume effect is a little bit ... err, snappy ... volume's off, then on again. Work with it, you get better.

I used to think that this pedal was starting to get scratchy, after a few days of owning it ... (I did buy it used, off of eBay). Then I noticed it only was scratchy on the overdrive channel of my amp, which made NO sense, but I realized that with the Wah down, lower frequencies don't hum like the higher one's do, so it creates an ILLUSION that it's scratching, which it's not. Wah works perfectly, just the sound I wanted, for the money, at least. I think I might like the Vox's better, but seriously, when playing out, on-stage, YOU will be the only one caring that it's a Vox rather than Dunlop. These are built well, metal construction, no problems here.

As said, built of metal, nice construction. I don't like a bunch of plastic around me feet ... seems a little cheap to me, even though I don't stomp around on my equpiment. If you weigh 349 pounds and you stop on your equipment, save your money for some liposuction and take valium before you play your equipment. Treat your stuff like it is your baby and you'll be surprised how many wonderful, unmolested years of reliability you'll get from your equipment.

Only problem ... my input jacks don't hold the cords! If I pull on the cords wrong, then they just ... fall out ... watch out for this, but since mine's used, it might just be my own problem.

Never dealt with.

I play classic rock, Samick Les Paul copy, Essex Tele through this wah and into my Crate Vintage Club 50 (3 10" speakers, 2 '69 GE 5751's, 2 Mazda Ecc83's, 4 El84) and I use a dirty channel and the clean channel. Coming in the mail is a Danelectro Cool Cat Chorus to add to my little setup, and this is all I use, so I don't have any fancy E.Q. pedals to tweak with. What I plug into is basically what I hear, and I hear good sounds from this pedal. Certainly buy it, the volume aspect is a plus also.

Very easy to use. Plug in it, step on it, and wah.

The high end can be a bit like getting poked in the ear with an ice pick, but there are mods out there to tone that down. As a pedal, it's not noisy until control pot that you move as you rock the pedal begins to get scratchy, which sounds very annoying. Once that happens, you can order new ones from Dunlop for about $25 but there a pain to replace due to the original being soldered on both sides of the board.
I have used it with Strats and a Ric 330 through a BFDR and Ampegs.

Again, big problem is the control pot getting scratchy. The pots are sealed. So, you can't spray any type of electrical contact cleaner inside of them to clean up that scratchy sound. Prior to the pot wearing out, they are reliable. But once the pot gets scratchy, what good are they?

Dunlops customer support I do rate highly. I once had a regular Cry Baby that had an inductor drop off the circuit board ( a design problem they've since corrected ) and they replaced the entire pedal, no questions asked. I mailed them the faulty one and they sent back a brand new one.

Overall, they're good when they're working. But there's a better method out there that Morely uses on their wahs. Instead of a mechanical device (the pot) changing the resistance to make the effect, they use a light principal with an LED/LDR set up. No pot, never will get scratchy....ever.

Press the foot down and you get a gorgeous, bright-to-dark sweep. This is the definition of wah, after all. The volume control, though, has not been as quickly satisfying. I'm an old hand at rolling the volume control on a guitar for a dramatic swell, and the Mr. CryBaby has too short an action length for me. Bang, there I was at full volume. But I'm having second thoughts about it. AS the months have gone by and I've used it more, I feel like I'm getting more out of it. Maybe there is enough travel between no volume and full. The taper is a quick one. But maybe it's going to work out with more practice.
Having tried a used DOD wah (not awful but to switch from wah to volume you had to press a switch on the side of the unit - are you kidding?) and having ordered a Morley from a catalog
(disappointing after all those years of reading their ads - no intensity) I finally got this wah-volume CryBaby. Now I'm happy.

Am using this straight into the board of a Yamaha MT4X cassette 4-track or into a Princeton Chorus transistor amp. Clean and dandy. Using a Peavey Odyssey LP-type guitar or old Gibson B-25 concert size acoustic with a Lawrence pickup (no EQ, no volume control). Can't give it a full review on the Gibson-Lawrence as I need to work with it more.

I had a CryBaby many years ago and loved it. No problems over long use. Hoping for more of the same.

I jam with friends and compose on the MT4X. From Pink Floydish to world beat-y to R&B and even folk. To slip in the CryBaby is always a temptation because the sound can be varied to fit the context. If I had to lose all my pedals but one, I would keep the wah. Would I buy another one with the volume control addition? At the moment, no. Perhaps with more practice I will change my mind.
One more untested but perhaps useful feature: when the volume side is maxed there is a variable boost effect. It certainly seems like a good idea but I haven't developed a full evaluation yet.