Pot Pedal Blues

[Michael Hill]

I have a goodrich 120 volume pedal. It wasn't quite cutting the sound completely when all the way off so I opened it up and adjusted it. That's been working well but today I was troubleshooting some pedal board issues and temporarily removed the volume pedal from the signal path. I was shocked at how much headroom I'm losing. I felt like no volume pedal was 25% louder than with the volume pedal wide open.

I like the simplicity of a passive pedal but I'm maybe something active that guarantees full range would be better for me. Anyone else been down this rabbit hole? These pedals aren't exactly cheap so I'm looking to educate myself before trying something else.

[David Irving]

I have a passive volume pedal (Dunlop, forget the exact model), which I use as an expression pedal with a Vertex Boost pedal. It's not too bad, although I don't actually use the volume pedal all that much.

https://www.vertexeffects.com/vertex-boost

[Larry Dering]

If you have your pedal set to completely cut the volume then the wide open position is far less than fully on. Try turning the amp gain up more. The volume pedal shouldn't completely cut the sound off when heel is down. Its a balancing act. I tried a active pedal and didn't care for it. I have 6 Goodrich volume pedals and I'm happy with their performance.

[Tucker Jackson]

These pedals aren't exactly cheap so I'm looking to educate myself before trying something else.

The way the Goodrich works (and maybe some other brands) is that you do not have access to the full range of the pot, you have like 95%. The user can decide how they want it to work and adjust the pedal accordingly.

1) Have it full off with heel down. But that means it's not fully on with toe down.

2) The opposite: Full on with toe down... but not quite off with heel down.

3) Or set somewhere in between those two extremes. Not sure what the advantage of this would be, but maybe someone will chime in.

The first option has the advantage of being able to completely silence the rig with the volume pedal. You do lose the top end of the sweep, but that's not necassarily a bad thing. Steel pickups are very hot compared to a guitar's and can easily overload the input to certain pedals or amp inputs.

I use the second option. This provides the full top of the sweep, which sounds a little fatter -- and the very small amount of sound that happens with the heel down is irrelevant in a gig situation because it's so very soft. For those times when I really need silence, kicking the switch on the tuner mutes everything.

There's no right answer, only which one you prefer. And yes, you can go to an active (powered) pedal if you need both ends of a sweep -- but it might brighten the tone, depending on what devices you have between the guitar and pedal. And that brightening can be either a bug or a feature, depending on what tone your ears are looking for. I'm partial to the traditional pot sound... but have used an active pedal in the past and recognize its charms.