[Courtney Nero]

Greetings. As if I don't have enough ways to spend money, I started experimenting with running my saxophone mic through a few guitar pedals. I have a Shure mic with an XLR cable. I put a mic impedance transformer (LiveWire) on the XLR and plug the 1/4" end into the pedal series. Last step in the pedal series is a direct box. I come out of the direct box and plug in to an amp or board.

I usually have a Dynamic Wah (Boss) OR a Qtron (Electro-Harmonix), along with a reverb pedal and a delay pedal. Reverb and delay are hip, but half the time I turn on the Wah or Qtron I get lots of feedback through the speaker. It's like the Wah/Qtron is making the mic either much more sensitive or sending much more signal through....

Any ideas on the problem? Any solutions? Thanks in advance.

 

[saxsensei]

I tried this years ago, with the same results. I remember thinking it might have something to do with impedance, but my knowledge of how that works is pretty limited, so I gave up.

However, I've recently been looking into this again, specifically the VoiceLive boxes, since I was hoping that something digital and/or designed for vocalists might be able to better handle a normal mic, rather than something designed for guitar pickups. Unfortunately, I noticed that the manual said that wah and distortion were susceptible to feedback, so I don't think it's got anything to do with that.

I did a bit of research and IIRC, the way wah works is that it periodically increases and decreases the mid-range frequencies (say, 2-6 kHz) - that's why you get that pulsating sort of sound - and these frequencies are the ones most prone to causing feedback. But this doesn't explain why guitarists don't have the same problem. If I had to guess, I would say it might be because they're usually facing away from their amps, whereas a sax player will be playing into a mic pointing backwards, often at speakers on the stage. Or maybe it does have something to do with the signal strength of a pickup vs. a normal mic.

I'd be very interested if you get this working because I can think of fewer things cooler than playing sax through a wah It sounded great when it wasn't feeding back, and distortion was pretty awesome as well, but the feedback when I turned my body even slightly just made it unusable :-(

I also play WX5, so I'm going to drag that out and give it a go, as well. No mic, so I'm hoping it will be OK...

 

[Courtney Nero]

Was just looking at a YouTube video on effects with saxophone by Dean Mongerio. He has a compressor plugged in his series after his Wah (EHX Qtron). Maybe that’s the solution....more research needed.

https://youtu.be/qqHyYBaBhas