‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’: The greatest use of the wah pedal in rock?
Fun fact: The inspiration for the wah-wah pedal came from the world of jazz music. In the heady days of hot jazz, trumpet and trombone players found that they could produce an expressive tone akin to a person crying by moving a mute in and out of their instrument’s bell. Like the bit in ‘Goldfinger’ where the trumpet goes “Wah-WAAAAAH-Wah”? Yeah, that’s how they achieved that sound. Trust a legend like Jimi Hendrix to create an equally iconic version of that sound on the electric guitar.
The 1960s saw a dramatic leap forward for what could be achieved with guitar technology. After Dave Davies sliced up his guitar amp with a knife and inadvertently created the distortion pedal, an arms race ensued to see who could create the next great guitar effect. Keith Richards’ use of a Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal to record ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was the next great leap, selling out all available stock of that particular pedal. Then came the wah-wah pedal in the mid-1960s.
Made almost by accident during the development of a Beatles-endorsed brand of Vox Amplifiers and originally envisioned to be played with the brass instruments the effect was inspired by, the wah-wah pedal found a happy home in the psychedelic rock movement of the mid-1960s. Its reverberating sound made screeching, distorted guitars sound surreally human in the hands of Cream’s Eric Clapton and especially Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix had started working with the pedal on the recommendation of fellow space cadet Frank Zappa, and his scorching, psychedelic blues was a perfect fit for this radical new piece of guitar tech. Its first appearance on a Jimi Hendrix record was on ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’, a single taken from the 1967 sessions for Axis: Bold as Love. However, his defining use of the pedal wouldn’t surface until one year later, where it comes paired with one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time.
How did Jimi Hendrix bring the wah-wah pedal to life?
It begins with Hendrix inventing one of the core tenets of funk guitar playing almost by accident. By striking deadened strings rhythmically and operating the wah pedal alongside it, he turned the guitar into a percussion instrument single-handedly. The whiplash sound of the song’s opening seconds provided a blueprint for the next 20 years of “Wicky-Wacka” funk guitar playing. It’s not even technically the song, and Hendrix just changed the face of music. Kinda par for the course for him, really.
Then, ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ truly begins. That opening riff sends shivers down the spine to this day. Virtuosic, yet still teeming with feel and emotion, a puckish, flirting introduction that takes standard blues licks and plays them with a lightness of touch that draws the listener in. Then everything goes absolutely ballistic.
The listener is hit with arguably the greatest open E string in the history of rock, The Experience crash in behind their bandleader as the trio produce a truly apocalyptic level of noise. Hendrix’s groaning, lascivious lead playing, rising above it. Honestly, the song could end there, and the effect would be much the same. However, just as a treat, we also get Hendrix’s underrated vocals reminding us that, yes, he could karate chop a mountain in half.
Based on what he was doing with that guitar, I doubt there’s much that he couldn’t do with those hands. Yet the secret sauce that makes ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ pretty much the greatest guitar track of all time comes from what Jimi Hendrix does with his feet, and the pedal that brought it all to life.
