A lot of players spin magic and craft signature tones from a cocked wah. (For those that don’t know, the cocked wah sound is that honking, mid-rangey, filtered tone that you get when you park a wah pedal at a specific angle and leave it there to do its dirty work.) Frank Zappa did it. Mick Ronson did it. So did Michael Schenker. And for the last decade, Matt Pike of High on Fire and Sleep—a man whose entire tone philosophy seems to be “louder, and also weirder”—used various versions of Daredevil’s Atomic Cocked circuit to do that job.
Tucked onto Pike’s board, which is otherwise anchored around crushing sustain and volume that could reasonably be classified as a structural hazard, the new Double Cocked does specialized work. But it’s impressively powerful by itself. The Double Cocked evolved out of Daredevil’s Atomic Cocked, but the functional mission is the same. It’s essentially a wah filter with two fixed, foot-switchable filters. Each filter sweeps a wah-like frequency range and can be set anywhere along that curve. So, you get two cocked-wah personalities, living in one pedal, ready to alternate between traditional rhythm and lead voices—or much less conventional combinations—all without crouching down to twist a knob mid-riff or searching through the sweep of a wah.
Food for Filters
Were the Double Cocked simply two filters, the pedal would be tons of fun. But here, the filters feed into a gain stage that adds dirt and a genuinely useful boost for solos. A FET boost follower does additional post-filter heavy lifting, which makes the Double Cocked plenty powerful without any assist from fuzz, distortion, or a giant stack. A blend knob at the center lets you dial in exactly how much filtered wah signal gets folded into that boosted output, which can be anything from a subtle EQ nudge to what Daredevil describes (quite accurately) as fully saturated Ronson, Schenker, or Slayer-adjacent territory. It may sound simple, but the Double Cocked adds real character and range. You can use it to add subtle peakiness to a solo, or to sound like you’re actively trying to injure your amplifier.
“You can use it to add subtle peakiness to a solo, or to sound like you’re actively trying to injure your amplifier.”
In the most practical terms, the thing that separates a fixed-filter from a regular wah is control. There’s no rocking, potentially floppy pedal to manage. Nor is there the risk of your foot drifting off the sweet spot mid-song. You dial in your voicing once, then just stomp to engage. For riff-heavy, drop-tuned, high-gain playing—Matt Pike’s whole world, basically—that’s a real advantage. But it’s an asset in traditional verse-solo rock environments, too. You can set up a rhythm/verse tone with a unique, musical mid-forward texture that cuts, and have instant access to a second flavor for solos—no scrambling required. As you can imagine, the possible filter combinations and contrasts can be much stranger, too. Incidentally, each unit is signed, numbered, and dated by Pike himself—a nice touch that transforms the pedal into a piece of memorabilia with a very practical purpose.
The Verdict
Though you have to be open to the possibilities of filter sounds to hear the potential of the Double Cocked, it can be full of surprises. It doesn’t exactly chase maximum versatility. And it’s definitely a tool built for a very specific job, and a musician with very particular tastes. But it does that job with real character, and impressive, unexpected musical range. This pedal could live and prosper in musical environments well outside those associated with Matt Pike’s heaviness. But if your tastes, and your rig, are optimized for sludge, doom, or stoner-rock realms—or even just old-school hard rock with a mean streak—this pedal will feel like it was built with you in mind. Because, frankly, it was.
