Auto-wahs can inspire confusion among
the uninitiated: Hey, where’s the rocker
pedal? Why would I relinquish control of
my wah to some guitar automaton?
In the most basic lay terms, an auto-wah
is an envelope filter that detects variation in
your attack and initiates upward frequency
sweep to produce the wah effect automatically.
The louder your input, the higher the
position of the frequency sweep—and vice
versa. The end result, however, is still recognizable
as a wah effect.
T-Rex’s new auto-wah, the Sensewah, is
the newest additon to the company’s compact
Tonebug line. Each Tonebug unit comes
in a retro-hued metal-and-chrome package,
and the crimson Sensewah looks like something
that might have been snatched from
the dashboard of a ’50s Chevy.
Sensation
The controls on the Sensewah are very
simple—two knobs (Sense and Range), a
single toggle switch that moves between
Wah Wah and Yoy Yoy settings, and an on/off footswitch. The unit is light and sturdy,
and the quality that typifies the T-Rex line
is evident. The straightforward design also
makes it simple and intuitive to access a
wide array of tones.
With the Sensewah between my Fender
Stratocaster and a ’69 Fender Super
Bassman, I set the Sense and Range
controls at noon, and the toggle
to Wah Wah, which gave me a
cool, funky, and steady auto-wah
sound right off the bat. Because
of the Strat’s lower pickup output,
I had to play a bit harder to
get a more drastic response from
the pedal. But by turning up the
Sense knob—which is essentially
a sensitivity knob that adjusts
responsiveness to your picking—
I was able to play with a more
natural touch and still fully
engage the device’s wah effect.
The Range knob controls the
width or narrowness of the envelope
and how far the wah effect
will sweep. At wide-open settings,
the wah will run through
the pedal’s full sweep range. At
lower settings, your sound will
be closer to the darker pedal-up
tone you’d get from a standard
wah pedal. It was also very easy
to dial in my instrument’s output
to interact optimally with the
Sensewah’s adjustable envelope,
and dropping the Strat’s volume not only
produces a cool cleaner tone, but a subtler
response from the unit.
Yoy!
With the toggle set to Yoy Yoy mode, the
Sensewah takes on a significantly different
personality through the use of formant-style
filters, which have more than just the
single EQ curve of a regular wah effect.
In the case of the Yoy Yoy setting, there is
a higher, more nasal, and resonant curve
that follows the lower curve. The result
is very vocal in the manner of a talk box,
and you can easily generate bizarre, but
musically pleasing sounds. Even at its
most high-mid focused settings, the pedal
remains throaty, full, and expressive. It’s
important to remember that because of
the high resonance in this mode, you’ll
want to make sure to tame extra brightness
elsewhere in your signal to keep the pedal
from getting too harsh—especially with
single-coils and a bright amp.
The Verdict
The Sensewah is about as straightforward
as auto-wahs come, and it’s the kind of
pedal that can really change the texture of
songs you’re playing without taking up a
ton of pedalboard room. And if you like the
sound of wahs and talk boxes, but don’t like
the extent to which you have to manually
manipulate those effects, the Sensewah is a
sensible solution indeed.
Buy if...
you want the wah effect, but you need your feet free for dancing and kicking.
Skip if...
you need the rocking control of a standard wah pedal.
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