One day in 1989, there was a debate in my high-school jazz band, what was cooler envelope filter or wah-wah? Still new to guitar I was only familiar wah through classics like “Shaft” and “White Room.” An older classmate said what Bootsy?! We hadn’t yet been blessed with the FUNK so we started blankly. So then he said, “what about ‘What I Am’?” I was unfamiliar with auto-wah and envelope filter but Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians single was a fixture in drama and art classes where our cooler teachers not only had the radio on during class but kept it tuned to more alternative leaning stations. I now understood, that weird wah sound on the solo of “What I Am” was an envelope filter.
A week or so later a member of the jazz band turned up with a DOD FX25 Envelope Filter. There was something captivating about how similar and different it sounded to the Cry Baby and Morley wahs floating around our circle of players. The touch sensitivity aspect was also intriguing, providing an early lesson to me on the concept that the player could interact and manipulate more than just the instrument with dynamics and feel.
