The Steel Guitar Forum

I would add that you make the LED and LDR's easily accessible for cleaning as dust and dirt are the downside of things dealing with light amplification stimulated by emission of radiation, well you get the idea.

So MANY rock guitarists are still using an essentially-clean boost early in the chain, just to get enough meat into it for the controls to chew on....

Steel guitars don't need a boost - they have a pretty hot output - but a volume cut that leaves the full taper of the pedal intact is a useful idea in my opinion.

Well, both - I don't know if Mr. Cunningham has a mercenary gland, or if the potential of this idea has at all tickled it, but very many of these kinds of experiments end up turning into products - if the idea works, well sure - people want it. If I was researching and building an experiment and my mercenary gland was at the end chain, kind of tugging the product through the intermediate steps, I would keep an eye on making it in such a way as to appeal to the largest possible bunch of users. I think that by percentage, electronic keyboard players are probably the second largest users of volume pedals besides steel; and since just about every rock guitarist's pedalboard has at least one clean boost on it, and another mild overdrive, this could be aimed in that direction too. And even if only appeals to 10% of underarm guitarists, overall that number still totally dwarfs ALL pedal steel guitarists. 5%? 2%? Get dwarfy...

You would certainly have to change a few parts here and there to make it work for standard guitar and/or low-impedance keyboards*, basically just matching the juice of the various pickup signals. Keyboard VP's already do that, the tragically fragile Boss FV500H and FV500L and others are already offered in high-and-low imps, AND as expression pedals - I think that's just a very low impedance? Maybe?


*(And if you can make a volume pedal that'll TURN DOWN DRUMMERS, there'd be a Nobel Peace Prize in it for ya! Love-beams abounding... Especially if the drummer doesn't know it.)

Here is the schematic and a look at how the layout will be from the top of the pedal.

The pedal controls the volume and tone by the foot pedal pulling a string that rotates a dual gang pot. This pot only controls led brightness in the vactrols (opto-isolator).

This pedal has a lead volume swell controlled by the foot pedal, max rhythm volume is set by a pot on the left hand side and swell is controlled by the foot pedal.

The dpdt footswitch chooses between volume controls and tone control. In the volume function the spdt toggle controls lead and rhythm modes.

I have an on/off indicator when the batt. or wall wort is plugged in and the on/off switch is flipped on. there is also a indicator for when the lead function is activated and when the tone function is on.