Whammy II

it's definitely  true that your tone gets messed with even when its in bypass, but personally i've found that it sounds kind of stupid in bypass, but if you just set the pedal to somewhere where its not doing anything it can be made to sound really interesting. i use it mostly with an electric mandolin outfitted with lace sensor pickups, and i like the way it makes them sound - a little fuller and more "live" (as in a live show recording), which works out in my ambient/ shoegazey music.

i give it a 7 because the paint is almost all gone, but otherwise it all still works great. must have gotten pretty throughly beat, too, to lose that much paint.

i got this thing used and it was obviously very used, but even though most of the labeling was rubbed off, i was still able to figure everything out by just plugging it in and messing with it. even the toggle mode is intuitive and incredibly useful. also, for anyone out there thinking about getting a whammy4; the whammy2 has about one centimeter of extra sweep in the footpedal, which makes a HUGE difference in your ability to smoothly articulate the effect.

never had a problem with it... knock on fish...

i'm giving it a 10 because i bought it mainly based on the fact that kevin shields of my bloody valentine uses the wh1, which i can't afford, and i found this at a consignment shop for $70. knowing that it had the same ivl chip in it, i bought it and am now totally satisfied that it does what i thought it could do. i run it through a stereo 16 band eq and a bbe maxcom stereo rackmount compressor/limiter/noise gate/sonic maximizer and then into an old "blue tube II" preamp and the decapitated head of an ampeg ba115 combo bass amp. if you ever get a chance, put it together with a boss rdd-20 modulating delay and rc-2 loop machine (or a similar setup with, you know, stuff you've got) and launch into deep space. as for other random applications, the detune function makes my novation xiosynth sound way more natural and analog, somehow, despite being totally digital. as far as comparing it to a wh1; it has the same chip made by ivl in canada, so the people who say it doesn't sound the same probably just have the input level set too high (which makes it sound like a turd). my main complaint is the same one everyone has: no true bypass. i might try taking to a local shop and see what they can do with it, since i have heard that it is possible to mod them. also, i wish the wh2 had the same shallow and deep detune options as the wh1.  for some reason they didn't think deep detune was necessary. oh, and to the people who say "only the wh1 has all-metal construction": the wh2 does have plastic on it, but only the little side pieces, and even they are pretty beefy. all the rest, everything that matters, is solid metal.

the reason i'm writing this review is to clarify wh-1 to wh-2.  the whammy 2 is badass, but if you think it sounds as good as a whammy 1 i think you're crazy.  a whammy 1 just sound so much more organic (which is weird cos it's anything but).  but seriously, imo, there's no comparison, and i'm sure someone will come on here later and say i'm an idiot, or that i'm only saying that because of what you have to pay for a whammy 1.  well, i paid almost as much for my whammy 2 as i did my wh1.  have you ever tried to get an exact sound from a record? not close, exact.  when you play with a wh1, it actually sounds like rage's first record.the 2 cannot pull that off, no matter what. it's an awesome pedal, but it can't. i'm not saying you're nuts if you buy a 2, but if you've got a gear problem like me, if you're gonna do something, do it right.

yes, you can depend on it, until it won't track octaves. but wh1s do it sometimes too, so oh well deal with it. whammys are weird like that.

the pedal's functionality is easy to get, but using a whammy the right way can take a while.

tried to get a power supply that worked with my whammy 1 once. they were okay.

the whammy is my favorite pedal. and i own ALOT.  but the whammy 1 is better.  i used the whammy 2 for a while in my band sakajaweeda, and then went home one day and plugged in my whammy 1; i was like, why am i using the 2? this whole review pretty much was a comparison- if your question is with the whammy 2-they're awesome. i swear by it. but the whammy 1 is better plain and simple.