Buddy Guy is a bona fide legend whose cranked-up, in-your-face, free-flowing style redefined the blues and anticipated tectonic shifts in the sound and feel of rock ’n’ roll. Numerous guitar players who would become legends in their own right, including Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton, have cited Buddy as a vital influence on their own groundbreaking recordings.

An important part of Buddy’s sound is the wah-wah pedal, an effect he helped incorporate into the blues lexicon. “It was an exciting moment that I wasn’t looking for,” he says of the first time he stepped on a wah pedal. “I punched this thing and I got something that I didn’t know I had.”

Today, Buddy uses a signature Cry Baby Wah customized just to his liking. “The Dunlop family is like a family to me, man,” Buddy says. “I’m not an engineer, I can just say, ‘OK, I would like to have this, I would like to have that,’ and they kind of figure out what in the world I’m talking about. And that is the best way in the world to get the perfection you want from an instrument, whether it’s a wah-wah pedal or anything else.”