For my first project, I will be sharing my "Virtual Whammy Bar" with you. This is actually a project that I've already done much of the work on, so this is more recap for myself. So I guess I'll begin with a little background:
Background
Many of you may already know what a whammy bar is, but for everyone else, a whammy bar(also called tremolo) is essentially a handle mounted on the bridge of a guitar that allows you to bend the pitch of all the strings simultaneously. It also is capable of bending the notes being played down in pitch, whereas with the typical bending of the strings with your hand can only bend the notes up. There are many different resulting sounds that can be produced from subtle tremolos to a "Dive Bomb". Go and listen to Hendrix or Steve Vai and you will probably hear some whammy bar use. But one thing to be noted is that many, perhaps most, guitars are not equipped with a whammy bar. There are a host of reasons not to build every guitar with one, but I will not go into them here; we'll just leave it at there being many objective and subjective (and believe me, everything guitars is subjective) trade-offs and compromises.
So what if you want take your Gibson Les Paul and achieve the unique sounds of a whammy bar? Well fortunately we have effect pedals. A quick search of www.guitargeek.com shows both Joe Satriani and Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead as having used the Digitech foot pedal in their rigs at some point. I personally own a Boss GT-8 which is a multi-fx board that includes a pitch bending feature that be controlled via an expression pedal. Both of these are controlled using your foot to adjust an expression pedal, which will lead us into the project at hand.
Whammy Bar YouTube Clip
Digitech Whammy YouTube Clip
Unfortunately I couldn't find clips comparing similar uses of the whammy effect, but I would note that the pedal lends itself to more extreme uses. I had a difficult time finding a clip where the performer did not go from full off to full on. Perhaps another impetus for my project......
