Why You Need a Volume Pedal!

on today's episode i'm going to show you some things that i don't think you realize you can do with a volume pedal the volume pedal is seen as this simple volume control device but it holds within it magic and today we're gonna do some magic [Music] the volume pedal gets oversimplified yeah it turns your guitar up or down but guitar is all about volume and it's all about dynamic so there are some really fascinating things you can do with placing a volume pedal in places and in situations you might not have thought of so that's what i'm going to try to go over today uh just a brief history is that volume pedals have been around for a while we see stuff like the old diamond uh somewhere in this room is a vox volume pedal that they made back in the early 60s that plugged into their organs so we probably see the evolution of putting your foot on a device to raise and lower volume coming from hammond organs or vox style organs and then we see fender releases these giant toaster-sized volume pedals i don't have one but there's a picture there and then ernie ball in the 70s releases the vp this is the junior that most of you have seen and possibly own 400 of this is obviously smaller because it's a junior but this is what we think of or at least what i think of with a perfected volume pedal it's essentially a pot inside with a string around it and as you pull it up and down you're just turning the knobs it's almost like turning the knob of your guitar it's just at your feet there are some other styles of this we have things like the visual sound visual volume which is really wild it's a crazy feat of engineering you'd be amazed how hard it is to show with led status where you are you have over-the-top stuff like this sonus that does volume effects as well as volume and you don't have to use a string in a pot you can use optical sensors or in the case of the layla it uses a magnetic sensor so as the toe goes down it gets closer to a magnet and that affects the circuit and ernie ball also has fancier stuff like this one with a tuner it reminds me of a certain product that i tried to do long ago let's jump right in though and demonstrate some things that i love to do with volume pedals that i hope you've never seen first we're going to do a little trick that i love to do with the fuzz face any classic germanium or vintage style fuzz this is a silicon this is a bc108 jimi hendrix edition you can buy these new really great sounding pedals there's a video where i do a mod to this you can go check it out if you're interested but here's the magic of a fuzzface you turn the fuzz knob all the way up and you use your guitarist volume knob to clean it up now some of the best clean sounds in the world are rolling off your volume on your guitar with a fuzz face on and the fuzz maxed out it's strange it defies logic but it's really awesome it's a great tone so one of the things here is that some guitars aren't as easy to move like a strat's pretty close you can use your pinky or your ring finger but les paul's 335s just other guitars aren't that easy to manipulate and how cool would it be to have a volume control like that at your foot so what you do is you take a passive uh ernie ball is the one i like but there's other passives and that means there's no circuit in this it's literally just a pot and i know listen i've told you nick how many times have i told him like one thousand at least one thousand times don't ever put anything in front of a vintage fuzz i've said it uh you're you're judging me you're like well here he goes back on his word i'm not going back on my word this is passive this essentially is just a guitar volume pot so it's safe and you want to put it before the fuzz and that fuzz knob maxed out when your toe is down you'll have full fuzz just huge fuzz sounds and then start to back it off heel more and more down and you'll start cleaning up and there's some magical sweet spots where it's just like beautiful clean sounds and it's at your feet so you can play guitar eat a sandwich play guitar swell the fuzz it's awesome check it out [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's a good jam really good i used this starlight the new uad pedal i had it on the tape echo which is an ep3 setting it's amazing that was the echo sound you heard there i also want to say a lot of drive pedals especially discrete drives that use transistors or fets so like my super bolt or countless others they'll do that same thing where they clean up at your feet so you can have a volume pedal before your favorite drive and it'll kind of treat your uh drive pedal like an amp by turning your volume down and cleaning it up so that's cool um the next sound i want to go through is using the basic just mono passive ernie ball as an expression pedal so a lot of times you buy pedals and they need expression outputs and you don't have an expression pedal and you don't want to buy one because you're not sure if you even want to use it well let's take the ocean's 12. this is electro harmonics it's just like a crazy reverb machine tons of stuff but it has a jack that says expression what you can do is you can get you one of these splitter cables this has a tip ring and then on one end um a stereo cable so you want to plug in to that expression here like such and then you just take the tip ring and plug in and out so what that's doing is connecting to both sides of that pot and now your volume pedal that you've had that you might have fallen out of love with we all fall out of love with our petals this might put you back in love this could be good for the relationship it's now an expression pedal so i'm going to have two sounds i'm going to set it up where i have a big old huge reverb sound here and then it's going to back off with a more natural kind of non-reverb sound so i can go in between them and uh yeah that's it also if you like these jams in the description below is a link we have all of our jams now on bandlab you can go over right they can go over and just you can play along with our jams it's awesome and it's free go to band do it do the link bandlab and play along with us it's like jam with jhs forever on every jam [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] another really great clever use of a volume pedal is to place it in the effects loop of an amp so some amps have effects loop and it says send and return or effects in effects out now what this is is your amp has a preamp section that usually has your volume control bass mid treble or whatever and then there's an output section which drives your speakers and the output of the amp well the effects loop goes right in the middle and a lot of people put delays and reverbs in there i don't ever really do that because i don't care but you can use that send return and simply place this in here and when you have those nice big huge preamp saturated guitar sounds coming from your tube amp it can get really loud you just put this in here and then you can start to back it off it'll keep your level of distortion in place and it'll just lower how the amp sounds in the room it'll it won't kill you as much i'll just let's just demonstrate it here with an example situation i'm plugging straight into my softec mig 50 and i'm just going to turn it way up so those tubes distort all natural tube distortion louder is more good [Music] josh can you turn it down because my baby is sleeping your baby's here i always bring my baby to work josh please turn it down oh but if i turn it down i'll lose that tube saturation from turning the amp up no you won't just put a volume pedal on the effects loop of your guitar head and then turn it down a little bit so if i put a volume pedal and the effects loop of my amp it keeps the tube saturation of the input tubes yeah that's what i said oh wow let's try that it just happens to be hooked up [Music] wow that's much better my baby will have a nap today look he's already asleep why are we yelling the last example of using a volume pedal in one of my favorite ways and maybe a way you have not used is to do basic swells now this is popular in a lot of ambient music uh it started early on when the volume pedal in the 70s was really put to work on pedal steel guitars lap steels and then it kind of evolved into spanish electric kind of stuff that we play but a good example of this to me is daniel lanois and i think of you know slingblade soundtrack or some of his other work and you just have these ambient washy parts you have kind of faux pedal steel stuff that i can play on guitar because i don't play pedal steel um and you just have a lot of echo you have a lot of reverb i'm going to use an rv6 i'm going to put it on a plate setting a pretty big reverb setting and then i'm going to use the starlight again and i'm going to use the memory man setting and so you'll just have a big decay sound a big reverb echoey sound and i will remove all the attack from my playing and what that means is my heel will be down every time i hit a note and i'll quickly swell in so you won't have any of the attack of the pit it'll just be like notes just bloom out of nowhere and so if you watch that view i'm just going to be doing this a lot and timing it like pix well pixel and yeah i'll use some slide and it'll be real trippy and like it'd be like a daydream you can't get out of [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] before we go to record time uh just a few other things to mention ernie ball has active volume pedals so a lot of times you get into situations where fully passive is not the best thing for your rig and it just depends on the rig so they make a version that has a buffer in it the tuner output you know is is active as well this one's still passive uh so there's that this actually has gain on it there are stereo volumes boss these are really great i've used these on some boards um the fv30l so you can do left right and stereo if you run a stereo rig there's also like super tiny ones that like i can't even fathom using because my feet are so big and there are devices that do volume and wah in one i personally hate them all um i know i've never been so outspoken but i just want to say i don't like that i'm not a fan and i don't know why i'm not a fan except that i just think that it's like not good i don't know what else to say and then last uh boost this is a really cool unit by vertex so it is a really powerful volume boost circuit so think preamp booster but you can plug in an expression and it becomes an active volume pedal with a ton of clean gain that goes way beyond what you had meaning if you use certain small amps or certain rigs or certain drive pedals you love put this in front and you can actually slam into them with an expression pedal plugged in and like have full control over a ton of extra gain clean going into your drives or amps yeah i think that's good i think i think that you know maybe this was good let's go to record time today's record time comes to us from the dumpster fire of 2020. it is bibadoobes fake it flowers really cool record uh one of my favorite of last year for sure it has little sprinkles of the cure toriyamos nirvana cranberries a little little that phoebe bridger's vibe you know it's a mix it's a cocktail of things it's really good check it out her guitar playing's really great great guitar tones really simple parts that fit the song well good songwriting good production too so check it out let me know what you think in the comments below and if you don't like it it's fine you know you're probably still a good person i guess thanks so much for watching this episode if you liked it hit like subscribe to the channel please please please and click the bell icon to get notifications of future episodes and in the comments below let me know when you first got a volume pedal which one you use and how do you use a volume pedal because i want to know i have an inquisitive mind bye you

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 187,805

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer

Id: 6Ot9rhGgcyQ

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021