ILL SEA MANUALS / wines

# Illthy Winesa real wah under your foot · free

FreeVST3MIDI pedal ready

A genuine expressive wah, full pedal travel with no dropout at heel or toe, three genre voicings, and a nonlinear ZDF core that growls when you dig in.

THE 2-MINUTE MIDI PEDAL SETUP, don't skip this. Every expression pedal sends a different range; Set Low / Set High calibrate Wines to YOURS so the sweep uses your pedal's full physical travel:

1. Bind the pedal (Wines v0.5.1+): right-click the on-screen pedal → MIDI Learn → rock your expression pedal once, heel to toe. Bound — and it stays bound next session.
2. Heel all the way down (pedal fully back) → click SET LOW.
3. Toe all the way down (pedal fully forward) → click SET HIGH.
4. Sweep. The whole voicing range now lives inside your pedal's real travel, no dead zones at the ends, no wah that "stops" halfway. Redo it any time you change pedals.

The calibration is saved machine-wide, set it once, every session and every preset respects it.

MIDI not arriving at all? Your DAW has to pass the pedal through. In REAPER: Options → Preferences → MIDI Devices, double-click your interface under MIDI inputs, tick Enable input from this device. Then, on the track holding Wines, click the record-arm input selector → Input: MIDI → your device → All channels, and enable record-arm + input monitoring — that is what feeds LIVE MIDI through the FX chain. (You can also skip Wines' own learn entirely and let REAPER bind it: click Wines' Position slider once so it's the last-touched parameter, then in the FX window click Param → Learn and rock the pedal.)

## Controls

Control | What it does
--- | ---
Pedal | The sweep. Mouse-drag it, or bind your MIDI expression pedal (above).
Voicing | Three genre voicings, different sweep ranges and resonance characters.
Set Low / Set High | Pedal calibration, see the box above. Can't miss it. Don't skip it.
Output | Level trim after the filter.
NERD: Q / Grit / Sweep | Resonance width, input-stage grit, and the sweep-law shape, the deep screws.

## The sweep display

The graph under the controls is the filter itself, not decoration. It draws the resonant peak the wah is sitting on right now, over a log scale from 100 Hz to 4 kHz, with the current peak frequency in the corner. The shaded band behind it is the range this voicing can travel, so Low Freq and High Freq stop being two abstract numbers, you watch the peak run between them.

Two things are worth watching there. The peak gets taller and narrower toward the toe, which is the wah opening into its vocal scream, that sharpening is the sound. And the curve never drops below the flat line, because the wah adds a resonant peak on top of your full dry signal instead of filtering it away, which is why switching it on doesn't cost you any volume.

Turn Q in NERD and you'll see the peak widen or spike. That's the fastest way to learn what these controls actually do.

## In NoAMP

The rig's WAH is this same engine plus two rig-only powers: Route (wah before or after your dirt) and Override Preset, a checkbox that makes YOUR wah setup global, so presets stop touching the wah entirely (the move when a physical pedal is bound). Wah can also go private per amp.

## Specs, tersely

Core | nonlinear zero-delay-feedback state-variable filter; drive-dependent harmonics
Travel | continuous full-range sweep law, no heel/toe clicks, no end-of-travel dropout
Control | MIDI CC (any), full calibration, smoothed position, bedroom-level clean sweeps

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