Del Kacher

American guitarist and inventor. Born 1938 in Hammond, Indiana. His many creations include the Wah-wah pedal. Born Delton Kacher in Hammond, Indiana, on Dec. 28, 1938, Casher idolized electric guitar innovator Les Paul and aspired to eclipse him as both a musician and inventor. At just 21, he helped develop and demonstrate the revolutionary Ecco-Fonic tape delay machine (ads ballyhooed its “limitless range” and “complete freedom of expression”) and kept busy as an in-demand session player. He was a member of the pop group Three Suns, a featured soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show and a guitarist for singing cowboy Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch TV show. But Casher, who also invented the Fender Electronic Echo Chamber and worked on Roland’s first guitar synthesizer, was no mere hired gun. He was an aggressively creative musical explorer eager to take on any artistic challenge — including jamming with the most experimental L.A. band of the era, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Soon Casher was leading a double life, doing morning sessions for the squares who watched Autry’s Melody Ranch and at night sitting in with Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Whisky a Go-Go. “So I was doing the Hollywood music business from A to Z,” Casher quipped. In the midst of all this, Casher also began work on what would become the wah-wah pedal. “Dick Denney at Vox U.K. invented the original prototype, the midrange boost switch. When it was converted to transistors, they put a variable switch on it.” Now that the midrange boost could be more precisely controlled, Casher had a flash of inspiration. “I thought, ‘Let’s put it on a pedal.’ We got one from a Vox organ, and it fit very nicely. After I demonstrated it to all these engineers and music producers, everyone said, ‘This will be the greatest thing — the trumpet players are going to love it!’”