Why does everybody seem to prefer the old wh-1 Whammy over the new one?
The Whammy II had redesigned “improvements” made when over the original whammy when it was released. The biggest mistake was putting the input gain control in there – if you don’t get the adjustment “just right” then it will not track the input pitch properly and, even if you do get it right, as the input decays the pitch tracking will eventually lose its “lock” on the signal. The original WH-1 Whammy had a special circuit that the Whammy II does not (thus no “input level” control), allowing almost any input signal level to be dynamically scaled so that the pitch tracking can “lock on” faultlessly. This also meant that as the signal level decayed, the pitch would remain locked due to the scaling action. The Whammy II loses lock on the signal as it decays, resulting in a highly unpleasant “warbling” sound which you may have noticed if you’ve used one.
