Good Volume pedal?

[Bill Terry]

I totally get why some folks like the active pedals, but I've just got a strong aversion to yet another 'thing' to plug in on a gig. Besides that, I've gotten used to the slight top end roll off that accompanies pot-pedals, in a way that I like. It's just a matter of taste I guess, but you won't have to look far to find a lot of top pros that still use pot pedals.

I used Goodrich passive pedals for a long time, and then stumbled onto a deal on an Emmons drop pin pedal, that mounts to the bar. The story I heard is that Buddy came up with that idea to make it easier to move your guitar on and off stage during backline/gear swaps at the Opry between acts. I don't know if that's true, but I REALLY like that feature myself. Of course you need the pedal bar with tabs also but I own a couple of Emmons push-pulls, so that wasn't an issue. For some reason a lot of the clubs around Austin like to run 3 or 4 bands a night, one set each. They're always rushing to get one band off and another one on, so it's a nice convenience to just be able to pick up my guitar and move it off stage, pedal still attached. It's handy even when you're just scooting the guitar around on a tight stage during setup. Also, the 'throw' on the Emmons pedals is kind of 'short and quick', at least compared to other pot pedals I've owned. I like that too.

As for the 'the pots wear out' problem, I guess that's true, but I stumbled onto a seller online a while back that had a stash of the those original AB pots, with the right taper, cheap, and I bought several. Besides, it's not like they wear out every 6 months, in my case they always last 'years' not 'months'.. with steady gigging. Easy swap out when they do...

Anyhow, once I decided that was the pedal for me, I sold the Goodrich pedals I had, and found another Emmons for a backup. They're relatively affordable, come up for sale quite often. YMMV of course, and unless you have an Emmons with the pedal bar tabs, that might take some minor 'mods/engineering', but everybody has a their own 'thing'..

[Wiz Feinberg]

I currently own 4 volume pedals. Three are Goodrich and one is from Emmons. One of the Goodrich pedals has active electronics and uses a light beam aimed at an LDR device. The input load is adjustable with a small flat-blade screwdriver on a trimpot under the bottom cover. The input impedance is adjustable from 1 meg-ohm on down to somewhere around 150 kilo-ohms. The lower the impedance, the less highs get through. The other two are passive pot pedals with 500 k-ohm pots. The Emmons pedal clips onto the Emmons pedal bar and has a 250 k pot.

Back when I started playing steel, in 1974, I used whatever volume pedal I could find. Eventually, after a couple of months, somebody sold me a Fender tone and volume pedal. It turned sideways on the top to change the tone. One could rotate their right foot sideways quickly to get a boo-wah effect with those Fender pedals.

A little later, I cam across an older steel player who hooked his volume pedal pot up backwards. His input wire went to the slider on the pot and the output fed off one of the side connectors. This hookup sounded similar to the Fender boo-wah effect because of the low-z load on the pickups at low volume positions. The pot didn't reach its full resistance, and cleanest tone, until it was all the way toe-down, at full volume. Guys who played with basackwards wiring in the volume pedal had a much heavier tone than most of what we heard on the radio and records.

[Greg Cutshaw]

I just got a Moyo volume pedal with a 500K pot. My other pedals are a Goodrich 120 and 120L and a Stage One. The Moyo is super smooth and has a tuner out jack which I use a lot. All of these pedals work fine. For some reason the Moyo pedal works by far the best for volume gutting which I use a lot on both tunings. I have had the Goodrich LDR, Hilton and Telonics pedals and have back to the classic pot pedal sound that I love so much.

It wouldn't be a big deal to velcro a larger plate on top of the Moyo but I'm surprised that I like it the way that it is.