VinceT
New member
My 1998 Budda Verbmaster has been noisy for a number of years - hiss as always, but the pots (volume, treble, bass) all seemed to be building up a static charge that could only be dispelled by turning them to extremes, then it would dissipate.
Though this didn’t sound or act like oxidation noise, I’d tried cleaning the pots, in various ways - checked the continuity and everything. Nothing changed. Some posts deep on the web talked about “dry” pots acting as capacitors - and that’s definitely what this sounded like - supposed fix, a drop of WD40 on the wafer (didn’t work).
The Budda isn’t my main amp, so I hadn’t really been diving in, but I got to thinking about switching out the pots to start afresh.
So today, I pulled the chassis to take note of the pot values. While I was doing that, just for fun, I traced the preamp and tone-stack (another long overdue task) - as Budda schematics just don’t seem to be out there on the web.
(FYI, the tone stack is a Baxendall type - just as my AC30-conditioned ears had heard it!)
Anyhoo, as I was looking at the guts of the Budda, I noticed the pots were only grounding to the chassis via physical connection of the shafts/washers. Did some research, which seemed to suggest wiring a ground bus across all the pots a) wouldn’t hurt; and b) might reduce noise issues.
10 minutes with a soldering iron and I was ready to test. HURRAH! The amp is running silent and the pots are clean through their sweep - no static-ish build up, just the sound of the guitar doing its thing in that magical Budda sweet spot.
Of course, I need to test at length - it would be churlish not to [emoji1] - but right now, I’m feeling quite happy to have spotted this and (hopefully) remedied it for good!
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Though this didn’t sound or act like oxidation noise, I’d tried cleaning the pots, in various ways - checked the continuity and everything. Nothing changed. Some posts deep on the web talked about “dry” pots acting as capacitors - and that’s definitely what this sounded like - supposed fix, a drop of WD40 on the wafer (didn’t work).
The Budda isn’t my main amp, so I hadn’t really been diving in, but I got to thinking about switching out the pots to start afresh.
So today, I pulled the chassis to take note of the pot values. While I was doing that, just for fun, I traced the preamp and tone-stack (another long overdue task) - as Budda schematics just don’t seem to be out there on the web.
(FYI, the tone stack is a Baxendall type - just as my AC30-conditioned ears had heard it!)
Anyhoo, as I was looking at the guts of the Budda, I noticed the pots were only grounding to the chassis via physical connection of the shafts/washers. Did some research, which seemed to suggest wiring a ground bus across all the pots a) wouldn’t hurt; and b) might reduce noise issues.
10 minutes with a soldering iron and I was ready to test. HURRAH! The amp is running silent and the pots are clean through their sweep - no static-ish build up, just the sound of the guitar doing its thing in that magical Budda sweet spot.
Of course, I need to test at length - it would be churlish not to [emoji1] - but right now, I’m feeling quite happy to have spotted this and (hopefully) remedied it for good!
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
