Cry baby (1 Viewer)

Holy shit - that post is the entire documentary ?!?! Gotta see the whole thing soon. Do they explain why Buddy Guy looks ready for an MC battle in 1982 ?
 
I was just thinking about selling my old Cry Baby wah-wah, but haven't plugged it in to see if it works. Well there is a project for the weekend!
 
How old is it?

I have a Thomas Organ Cry Baby made in Chicago in the late 60s/early 70s, but I'm always in the market for old Italian Fasel versions...
 
Mine had to be made late 80's. I remember my mom driving down Sunset to Guitar Center, it had to be around 1988, give or take a year.
 
Oh, a Dunlop then. They started making them in 1982. Still, it's over 20 years old so you could probably sell it to someone as "vintage." ;)) There may be people who look for the earlier Dunlops. Does it have a power adaptor jack? If not, it's one of the first three versions that Dunlop made, and you could use that as a selling point.
 
Yup you hit the nail on the head. It's a dunlop. Must be one of the later versions though, because it does have a power adapter jack. I was looking for a year, but don't see one anymore. I really gotta dust this baby off and see if it works. Try some of my SRV chops. Ha, well I will at least see if it works.

crybaby.jpg
 
You should really get that open and see what's up in there. About 10 years ago I stumbled on a box of old music stuff that had a couple of '70s or '80s pedals in it - a Morley wah and a Jen wah, if I recall. Both had their innards gutted from old batteries that had corroded. I suppose I should have kept them and tried to get them refurbished, but, you know, I didn't.

Get those old batteries out of there if you can...
 
I was looking for a year, but don't see one anymore.
You won't find a date, you have to date them by looking at the components. But unfortunately there's nothing really special about a late 80s model like you've got there. Well, except that it's 20+ years old. That's something. The electronic parts do change over time, and that can definitely affect the sound (in a good way or a bad way). It kind of depends on what was used in there.

But the old style capacitors and carbon resistors do age, which is why people go crazy trying to recreate some of the old circuits and finding that their new ones don't sound like the exact same circuit that's 30 years old. I built a germanium fuzz box not too long ago and used transistors from the 60s. That little fucker is out of control. In a good way.

The MXR Distortion+ was a big deal in the 70s, but I never understood the appeal. They didn't sound good to me. Way too midrangey which made it sound harsh. But I have one now, an early one from the 70s, and it sounds incredible. So maybe my ears have changed, or maybe some of the values of the parts have faded just enough to make a difference.

Or maybe it's all a bunch of bullshit and a new box off the shelf is just as good.
 
There's something to the age thing - as capacitors age and/or get used, they can lose some of their capacitance (new word?), as it were. Sometimes that can be a good thing. And distortion on bass can be a real bugger; it tends to cut much of the low frequencies, which kills me in a live mix.
 
Yeah, most distortion circuits boost the midrange frequencies, which effectively decreases the high and low ends, and that isn't exactly where you want to go with a bass. Most of the time.

The old style capacitors lose the most capacitance (ability to store voltage), some of them as much as 10% a year (!), which would effectively take them out of some old circuits. But carbon resistors fade too. A lot of the old components were made out of organic stuff that changes over time. Even potentiometers change, and their resistance values change. If that wasn't enough, capacitors and resistors are also affected by temperature. So those germanium transistors sound different when they are cold compared to when they are warm. It's a little crazy. When you buy an old Cry Baby or distortion box you never really know what you're going to get until you plug it in.

It's a little funny to see, say, guitar makers using the old style capacitors in their tone circuits. It isn't the capacitors themselves that people like in a vintage Gibson (for example), it's the aging of them. But the whole guitar ages - the wood dries, the nitrocellulose finish cracks (which sounds bad, but is really a good thing) - and you can't duplicate or fake the passage of time.

Okay, wake up everybody...
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top