Question: What do these songs, and the recording artists who performed them, have in common?
- Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix
- White Room by Cream
- The Theme to Shaft by Isaac Hayes
- All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
- Whole Lotta Lovin’ by Led Zeppelin
Answer: they were best-selling hits, and featured guitar instrumentals made memorable by the use of a wah-wah pedal.
Any garage bank guitarist who has plugged into an amplifier to emulate the rock or R&B riffs of the great lead guitarists has likely tried his hand – or more aptly, his foot – at using a wah-wah pedal. It is so named for the distinctive wah-wah sound it makes when notes are plucked, and the pedal is rocked.
I used to own one of the originals – a Thomas Organ Cry Baby that I purchased in the late sixties. It would be worth much more today than the $10 I sold it for in the 80s, realizing how extraordinarily difficult it is to imitate the craft of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton.
What I didn’t know until I came across this NYT article today is that the wah-wah pedal came into being entirely by accident in 1966. The Thomas Organ Company, in re-designing Vox amplifiers made popular by The Beatles, came across a knob that added mid-range boost to guitar sound. The electronics were married to an organ volume pedal, and the wah-wah pedal was born.
The wah-wah was one of a long line of solid state effects pedals, re-modeled amplifiers, mixers and processors that helped create the ground-breaking music of the late 60’s and 70’s. The transistor and developments that would occur later changed how songs were composed, played, recorded and re-assembled to create the music genres that are well-known today.
The developments in electronics and digitization that occurred in the recording of music soon altered how music was distributed. The early 70’s ushered in cassette tapes and Stereo 8-track cartridges that made music portable (players and automobiles) by offering an option to bulky turntables. The media stood up to wear and tear far better than vinyl discs. They took up less space on store shelves, too.
Compact Discs, pioneered by Sony, followed shortly after in the late 70’s. Sony’s addition of the Walkman line – for both cassette tape and CDs – beginning in the 80s, made music truly portable. By 2000 the first MP3 players were coming on the market. Apple’s iPod stole the show beginning in 2001.
The rest – hard disk storage, Napster, iTunes, streaming audio, the dislocations experienced by the recording industry – we know well.
When I look at what is happening with social media and cloud computing I find myself thinking back to what has transpired in the music industry over the past 45 years.
It was difficult in 1966 to predict what would happen with the music industry no matter if you were an artist, a producer, an engineer or a recording company that distributed the IP. It’s just as difficult now to predict how the changes in social media, and the processing and storage of data of all forms, are going to evolve how we work, and how and what we sell and market.
Agility, courage to depart from what has become comfortable, and willingness to accept and try new things are essential to build competencies, careers and businesses. Pssst. But don’t get rid of all the old stuff … it may be worth money one day.
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