volume pedal mods

[prashanth]

hi everybody.

this is my first post and i just wanted to find out what to do with my volume pedal. i bought it real cheap ($5) cos its a piece of crap with the intention of modding it into either an expression pedal for the 505II or a decent wah pedal. i don't know how to do either so please help me out here with whichever one a beginner like me might be able to handle or feel free to suggest something else too.

[wampcat1]

I dropped a clean boost circuit in mine and made it an active volume pedal. Works great and was very easy.

[RickL]

For info on building an expression pedal for a 505 type "505 expression pedal" into the search function and follow the links.

For anything else consider: a passive volume pedal is just a pot that you turn with your foot. It can replace any control in any effect as long as it is the correct value. If your volume pedal has, for instance, a 500k pot it could replace any 500k pot in any circuit, just build the circuit and wire the pot in the pedal as if it was a panel mounted pot. If it works backwards just reverse the two outside connections.

If the pot in your volume pedal is the wrong value you may be able to use the mechanism to control another pot. How easy it is to replace the pot will depend on how it is mounted in the pedal.

Beware, most volume pedals don't turn the pot through it's whole rotation so you may not get as much control as you'd like. For instance if you use it to replace a speed pot on a phaser you may only get control of the lower (or upper) half of the speed range. Note that most wah pedals take this into account so if you build one of the wah circuits available on the net it will probably work just fine with the limited range of rotation.

Another option if you don't want to build a circuit from scratch would be to rehouse an existing pedal in the volume pedal and use it to control one of the existing pots. Just swap the wires from the existing pot to the one in the volume pedal. Example: rehouse a distortion pedal, treadle controls distortion amount, (or tone, or volume...). It's worth doing this with a cheap pedal that you don't normally use much. Sometimes having extra control makes what was a useless pedal into something quite attractive.