Fixing tone-suck in an Ernie Ball Volume pedal

[beaubrummels]

In another thread (https://forum.seymourduncan.com/sho...edal-dilemma&p=3506451&viewfull=1#post3506451) I mentioned how I stopped using my Ernie Ball volume pedals because I noticed the loss of top-end on my guitar sound.

I had a spare long-shaft 500k pot laying around that actually reads high at 530k. Since I have two EB vol. pedals, today I decided to hack one and see if there was a difference replacing the Clarostat 250k with a higher value.

Well, moving to 500k+ actually worked. I tried a Strat and a Les Paul and A/B'd them through the 530k EB volume pedal vs straight in and I was not hearing the loss of treble I noticed before. The EB has a very slight mid-bump, however, but not that bad. I think I'm going to try this for a while and see if I notice any issues in use with other pedals and tones, etc.

Have any of you guys hacked your volume pedals to fix the tone suck problem? Added treble bleeds or replaced pots? Other recommendations?

 

[Chickenwings]

Re: Fixing tone-suck in an Ernie Ball Volume pedal

My friend swears by goodrich volume pedals but im pretty sure they work the same way as ernie balls. Active volumes like morleys wont give you tone suck.

 

[jimijames]

Re: Fixing tone-suck in an Ernie Ball Volume pedal

Yeah, I would just go with an active volume pedal. The problem is that you're introducing another external volume potentiometer after your signal travels through the cable and everything, so it just seems like you'd want to use something electrified. If you can solder in a new volume pot you can solder together a zvex sho preamp and put that in a wah pedal housing. Or, if you don't want above unity volume you can just wire up a simple buffer (which is less than 10 parts total) and run that through the volume pot.

Now that I think about it the z.vex volume control makes noise so adjusting it live would be pretty annoying - you could alternatively drill the side of the enclosure to mount a "max boost" pot (which is just the 5kc the z.vex circuit uses for boost) and then wire the output to the volume potentiometer so you can adjust the volume without that "crackle okay" noise the front label talks about.

It would all be fairly simple to do but would require a little planning in terms of where to mount the components and where to drill everything.