Kirk Hammett and Mrs. Smith will face off to see who is the top 'wah abuser' in Cry Baby Battle Royale

(Image credit: Julia Reinhart/Getty Image)

Kirk Hammett has long professed his love of the wah pedal – so much so that he used three (!) of them together on Metallica’s Hardwired.

But now his wah supremacy is being challenged, and the electric guitar player throwing down the gauntlet is none other than Mrs. Smith, who Guitar World once called the love child of Dame Edna and Yngwie Malmsteen.

Mrs. Smith first stepped to Hammett in an interview last year on the Mark Agnesi Show, telling Agnesi: 

“I abuse the wah more than Kirk Hammett and I’ve challenged him multiple times to a wah-off. No response.

“Why are you hiding behind your wah-wah pedal, Kirk Hammett?”

Well, Hammett is hiding no more. The Metallica man has now accepted Mrs. Smith’s challenge, and the two will go head to head – or, as the ad puts it, “foot to foot,” in a Cry Baby Battle Royale.

The filter fireworks happen March 8 at the Senate in Columbia, South Carolina. And to make the whole thing even weirder, Hammett’s Wedding Band covers project, with Robert Trujillo, Whitfield Crane and others, will be performing as well.

For more information or to purchase tickets, head here.

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Richard Bienstock

Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.