Del Casher, a session musicians and the inventor of one of rock guitarist’s most beloved effects, the wah-wah pedal, has died at 88. The news came as part of a GoFundMe campaign to help support his wife, Eiko, revealing that Casher passed on Oct. 1 following a battle with cancer.
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The GoFundMe started by neighbor and good friend Al Burg, noted that in addition to fighting cancer, Casher’s sound studio business had been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing him to sell valuable guitars and equipment to pay the bills, in addition to taking out a reverse mortgage on the couple’s home.
Casher, born Delton Edward Kacher in Hammond, Ind. on Dec. 28, 1937, is best known for the wah-wah pedal, an effects device for electric guitar that mimics the sound of a human voice reciting the onomatopoetic phrase “wah-wah” when stepped on or pushed with the foot.
He got his start after college performing guitar and banjo on The Lawrence Welk Show in 1959, as well as sitting in with singing cowboy Gene Autry and the instrumental group Three Suns while tinkering with technologies that could make his playing more distinctive. According to Guitar Player magazine, Casher hit upon his signature invention while working with Vox amplifier and its American parent company, Thomas Organ, where he turned a tone-control circuit into a foot-operated effect that allowed guitarists to cycle through a sequence of frequencies that gave the pedal its distinctive name.
While working as a Vox consultant in 1966, Casher noticed that a variable tone control on one of the company’s amps produced the “wah-wah” effect when it was adjusted a certain way, realizing that he could change the way an electric guitar sounded and bend it to sound like a trumpet or a harmonica player cupping his hands around the mic and his instrument. Casher convinced the company’s engineers to adapt his idea into a foot-operated pedal that was initially called a “Cry Baby,” then recorded a demo album for music stores to demonstrate his device, though neither the pedal nor the album gained much traction when they were released in 1967.
“They thought I was a crackpot, but they humored me,” Casher told The New York Times in 2011 about idea to record the demo album.
Casher got his big break, however, when after jamming with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in 1966, Zappa gave one of the pedals to Jimi Hendrix, who helped turn it into a must-have for a generation of players after spotlighting its watery, crying sound on such Electric Ladyland classics as “Voodoo Child” and his cover of “All Along the Watchtower” in 1968 and at the Woodstock Festival the next year.
His invention also got a spotlight from Universal Pictures, which hired Casher to use it on the soundtracks to the Don Knotts films The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) and MGM, which used it in the 1967 Tony Curtis comedy movie Don’t Make Waves.
Over the course of his career, Casher also became an in-demand session musician, working with Autry, Frank Sinatra, Sonny & Cher and appearing with Elvis in the 1964 movie Roustabout and with Jerry Lewis in that year’s Patsy.
Soon enough, some of Hendrix’s peers caught on, with Eric Clapton using the pedal on Cream’s “White Room” and “Tale of Brave Ulysses” as well as Blind Faith’s 1969 debut album, as the effect was picked up by everyone from Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page (“Dazed and Confused”), to Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi (“Electric Funeral”), Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (“Echoes”), Jeff Beck (“I Ain’t Superstitious”), George Harrison (“Wah Wah”) and Guns N” Roses’ Slash (“Sweet Child O’ Mine).”
One of the biggest showcases for the effect came in 1971, when it was prominently featured on the Oscar-winning Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes.
Casher also developed some early guitar-synthesizer technology for Roland and worked as a composer for many years, including performing and producing the music for more than 200 episodes of the children’s TV series The New Zoo Revue.
“I feel gratified that I was there at the beginning,” Casher told the Times in 2011, while noting that bands from Pearl Jam to U2 have used his beloved device in concert and on albums. “I would just like guitar players to think of me once in a while. The only thing I ask is: remember me.”
Watch a video of Casher demonstrating how his signature pedal worked below.
