This is a report on my build of the Poison Apple Auto-Wah, based on the Mad Professor Snow White. I wanted to build some pedals that weren’t just overdrives and fuzzes, so I picked this up.

Inspiration

I liked the snow white name of the original pedal and wanted to play on that - and buntings are fun birds, so I went with the Snow Bunting as the bird for this one. These are really pretty birds of the arctic north.

Buntings were a name for a family of birds, but as many birds have recently been reclassified based on genetics are a name for a birds, the buntings have been distributed across a few families. There are “proper” buntings or “Old World” buntings. But there’s also some buntings that are in the cardinal family, and buntings in a related family of longspurs. Effectively, all these birds look like large sparrows, but they’re all pretty cool. The cardinal-related buntings like the Painted Bunting are quite garish. The snow bunting is most closely related to longspurs.

I do have a different autowah pedal being printed soon, which I think has a more appropriate bird, but you’ll have to wait.

This was one of my earlier pedals without a background, and I’m happy with how it came out - the blue colors are really nice and the snowflake looks great. It’s a little boring and I’d probably adjust the font if I were printing it again, but overall I think it’s pretty crisp. I waited to post this because I thought it was a good “Christmas” pedal for the season :).

The Build

It was a clean build, no problems. It’s a surprisingly straightforward pedal, with no unusual parts to source. I would have expected an LED and LDR or something at least, but nope. Assembly was straightforward, and the enclosure was printed correctly the first try.

The Pedal

I find only some of the settings to be usable. This thing really quacks with the delay turned low, which adds autowah on every note. That’s a lot of fun.

But many of the settings make the tone awfully bright; I wish this was more ‘neutral’ sounding and passed through the overdrive pedal’s tone more. It’ll also cause higher notes to get clipped in a bad-sounding way. You really have to go in more with a more muted tone or with treble turned low or it gets a bit icepicky. Given those limitations, I found it to be pretty good with a baritone, esp on the low strings, and I bet this would do really well with a bass.

Maybe I’m not using it right? All in all, I could see this staying on the board to add some flavor to backing tracks, but it’s a little too fiddly for regular use.

Firsts

• 😭 First autowah

Ratings

• Build: 5/5 🌟
• Pedal: 3.5/5 🌟