A mint-condition
original WH-1
Whammy.
Photo courtesy
of DigiTech10. Tom Morello's DigiTech WH-1 Whammy
When Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled
debut exploded like a cluster bomb in
1992, the consensus wtf? moment among
guitar heads came at about the 3:50 mark
in the album’s lead-off single, “Killing in the
Name.” Tom Morello’s impossibly elastic
solo was the boldest use yet of DigiTech’s
WH-1 Whammy pedal, introduced
in 1989. The Ferrari-red unit featured
pitch-bending and harmonizing technology
developed by IVL Audio, and with
its expression pedal allowed squeals and
dive-bombs that could extend as low (or as
high) as three octaves.
For Morello, the Whammy offered
an intuitive way, especially in the higher
octaves, to emulate the siren-like samples
he heard in the southern California gangsta
rap sound of Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, and Ice
Cube. “I was basically designated to be the
band’s DJ,” he said in a 2008 interview,
“and I found, with very simple manipulations
of a very simple pedal, that all of a
sudden the guitar, for me, was finding a
lot of very new sonic possibilities.” Morello
tapped into the unit’s
harmonizing capabilities
as well, most notably
on the devastatingly
funky “Know Your
Enemy,” which opens
with an infectious
stacked-fifths riff
and culminates in
one of the nuttiest
guitar solos
of the ’90s.
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