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What would you put in a guitar?

Neil.

By Neil.
in Kit & Tab

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cheddatom Escapee

cheddatom

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Slighty, but not compeltely OT am I the only person in the world who barely uses his volume pot?

 

I don't really play guitar amped up. My bass has an active pre-amp with volume controls for each pup, so yeh I do play with them but that's more like a kind of tone control.

 

When you turn your volume pot down , it cuts treble like a deranged butcher in a slaughterhouse.

And trust me , an output buffer inside a guitar makes a huge difference.

If you use a long cable (3-6m) without one you lose alot of definition and treble (the cable basically acts as a resistor).

 

Depending on the buffer circuit, it could make a huge dfference to your tone, but not necessarily a good one.

 

A buffer in a pedal at the end of a 10m cable is perfectly acceptable. You're basically telling me that if I instead connected to the pedal with a 1 foot cable, or directly wired the output of my guitar to the input of the pedal with a few inches of wire, I would suddenly hear a massive increase in treble.

 

Bollocks! A buffer after your cable is fine.

 

Anyway, my question was this: Is there a significant loss of high frequencies when using a volume pot instead of going straight to the jack? If so, why don't they use volume pots which when on full output match the response of going straight to the jack? I always thought leaving it on full was like bypassing it, but maybe not.

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Simno Escapee

Simno

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I don't really play guitar amped up. My bass has an active pre-amp with volume controls for each pup, so yeh I do play with them but that's more like a kind of tone control.

 

Yeah I occasionally take it down a notch or two to change the tone, but most of the time it's full on because the guitar simply sounds a hundred times better! :LOL:

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Phill Escapee

Phill

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Yeah I occasionally take it down a notch or two to change the tone, but most of the time it's full on because the guitar simply sounds a hundred times better! :LOL:

 

I only use mine to clean things up sometimes by rolling a little off.

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Don'tPostThePear Escapee

Don'tPostThePear

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Anyway, my question was this: Is there a significant loss of high frequencies when using a volume pot instead of going straight to the jack? If so, why don't they use volume pots which when on full output match the response of going straight to the jack? I always thought leaving it on full was like bypassing it, but maybe not.

 

let's take a 250k vol and 250k tonepot. Both maxxed, they have a 250k ohm resistance "against" ground. Their combined resistance is even lower, they are in parallel so that is like having a 125k resistor going to ground, correct me if i am wrong.

 

Now let's take a guitar pedal. Most of them are made with 1000k ohm (1Mohm) input impedance resistors cause anything less would make treble loss.

 

According to this i would say that the pots cause treble loss.

 

I made that bypassable tone pot mod, which makes my guitar a bit brighter even when the tone pot is maxxed. Nothing else happened to the sound so that makes the whole guitar tone cap a bit bullshit like. (i have a orange drop in there, i like the bypassed sound more)

 

So why don't they use 1 or 2M pots? Because their taper is so bad that maybe you should turn your pots after halfway until something happens to the sound.

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Neil. Escapee

Neil.

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Why can't they make a 2M pot with a decent taper?

 

why not make your own taper then? the easiest is to do it with a linear pot. you just put resistors between the lugs and you can have it at whatever taper you want. if you want to be even more precise, get a 5M pot and you can make it, for example, a 3.8M Reverse Audio 68% taper if you want.

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Phill Escapee

Phill

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Phill where can I find plentiful pictures of your axes? Hugh is starting work on my new one in a week weeeeeeeee :D

 

sweet!! the flickr page linked in my sig has a bunch, there's a few on facebook and if you want any others give me a shout and i can take some for you.

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Impulse 101 Escapee

Impulse 101

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Ahhh. What do you gain by bypassing the tone and volume, compared to having the tone and volume all the way up?

 

The volume and tone have a significant effect on the sound of the electronics. They steal level and you loose a bit of high end too.

 

JT

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Simno Escapee

Simno

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sweet!! the flickr page linked in my sig has a bunch, there's a few on facebook and if you want any others give me a shout and i can take some for you.

 

Looking wicked man, I love the finish on the headstock of the cracked mirror, looks bloody epic!

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Don'tPostThePear Escapee

Don'tPostThePear

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I'm just wondering WHY not how to make one. In high end Hi-Fis, what do they use for the volume pots?

 

stuff like this

 

http://www.alps.com/WebObjects/catalog.woa/E/HTML/Potentiometer/RotaryPotentiometers/RotaryPotentiometers_list1.html

 

notice how 100k is the biggest.:(

 

Or digital volume controllers.

 

I have some of those digital potentiometer ICs, if i remember well i have never saw any of them being bigger than 100k. Also they are a bitch to program compared to an arduino.

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cheddatom Escapee

cheddatom

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so then, if big enough pots don't exist, there are pots in your amp's pre-amp which will reduce hi end by just as much, or if you have a volume control in your guitar, the limitations of the pots in your pre-amp will not be heard, because they're happening in your guitar.

 

So, what i'm saying is, there will always be at least 1 pot in your chain, cutting out this majical top end, so how come cutting out your guitar's volume pot, as opposed to your pre-amp's volume pot, makes so much difference?

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Don'tPostThePear Escapee

Don'tPostThePear

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buffered or amped signals won't loose highs somehow if the vol. pot is after the buffer/gain/drive etc. stage, but this is black magic area for me with impedance and stuff.

 

So you can use a 5k pot as a volume pot with a hifi amplifier you won't loose your delicious 50Khz audiophile high-end response.

 

This is interesting:

http://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy-tutorial/misc/cmoy-tangent-sch.pdf

There is a 10k vol. pot. at the input which looks quite low and a 100k res. to ground which is quite low again. But this stuff is fed by line-in signal, so it gets amped stuff.

 

So i would say that the difference between pickups and audio signals is that the pickups signal is pretty low/weak or something so it is more affected by the pots but i don't really know what is the exact reason.

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  • 1 month later...
cheddatom Escapee

cheddatom

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I dunno I've been ruining about getting a digitech whammy, I haven't heard much on them though... Then I thought I'd like MIDI strips as well.... I dunno I'm just confused. Any thoughts on nice, fairly heavy distortion that's good for tapping and such like new born solo tapping sorta? Any thoughts?

 

This post is amasing.

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