NAMM 2025: Jim Dunlop has expanded its signature Cry Baby lineup with a new signature wah pedal for the late Mick Ronson, and it reached out to Bob Rock, producer of Metallica’s Black Album, for help.
Ronson is one of the legends of wah, pioneering its use as a filter. He stepped on the treadle, found the sweet spot for his electric guitar tone, and left it there. Et voila, the cocked wah sound, and which as Dunlop notes was “key to the tone-shaping vision that Ronson used to transform the face of popular music through his work with David Bowie and many others as both an artist and a producer”.
It has become an essential technique that’s used also by the likes of Michael Schenker over the years. But where does Rock fit in with all this?
Well, Rock was a friend of Ronson’s and he had the late Bowie guitarist’s original Italian-made wah pedal, lending it to the Dunlop R&D team so they could reverse engineer a new circuit.
“To capture all of the nuance and detail responsible for Ronson’s unique wah sound, our engineers created a custom inductor that replicates the higher frequency response and subtler peak of the original pedal,” says Dunlop. “The resulting sound offers an exquisitely balanced sonic profile that’s bright and clear with peaks that stay musically smooth.”
Ronson’s Cry Baby is a classic Cry Baby. There’s no bells and whistles. No level controls or Q knob for adjusting the filter. Just step on it to engage, find the sweet spot and leave it. Alternatively, keep your foot on the treadle and rock it back and forth in the style of Jimi Hendrix, Kirk Hammett, and so on.
Dunlop says it meticulously matched the specs of the original, testing the tolerances of the components in the circuit, doing the due diligence to create a boxfresh vintage wah. There are “period-accurate” low-gain transistors, all matched to the original to replicate the same EQ curve.
Rock, who has an ear for these things, says it’s bang on.
“You place the wah, and leave it there, and that's the tone,” Rock says. “It's all over every record he ever made, and I’ve used it on every record since I got it. Dunlop’s engineers spent the time and sent me the prototypes, and we nailed that sound.”
It looks pretty cool, too. The Mick Ronson Cry Baby will be available from April and it is priced £249. For more details, head over to Jim Dunlop.
