Foot Volume Impedance Question

Generic Dreadhead

Right, I'm looking to get a Foot Volume Pedal for my Pedal board.
Essentially I'm running all my Drive, Dirt, Dist and EQ in front of the Amp.
And All my Modulation and Time Based effects in the loop.
I'm going to have the Volume Pedal in the loop, before the time based effects.
The problem is I use 3 guitars, 2 of which have ACTIVE humbuckers (LTD and Schecter) and the other (Fender) which has PASSIVE.
I see there is a lot of info about Impedance etc. I just want to know what pedal I can get that will cater for my needs

TroutMask

Your volume pedal will not affect the loading on your pickups because you're using it in the loop. It will turn down the volume of the amp, as it's in the loop.

TroutMask

What amp BTW?

Generic Dreadhead

TroutMask wrote: »

What amp BTW?

Line6/Bogner SpiderValve MK1 with Orange PCP212 Closed Cab

TroutMask

Don't know about the viability of placing a vol pedal in the FX loop. There's a pair of buffers in there, so it won't affect your guitar input. What it might do is affect the tone of the amp as you effectively short out one portion of the loop. Maybe if you tell us what you're trying to do, we could arrive at another way of doing it? An example: i was using a (pretty crappy) Morley FX blender to get wet/dry on a DDL pedal. When i got my Eventide, i ditched the Morley, as the Eventide has full control over any parameter via expression pedal - much nicer. Maybe the Line 6 has some kind of expression control over the FX loop?

TroutMask

Just read your manual and it looks like a bog-standard fx loop: normalled pre-out and power amp in. Looks like their expression pedal only controls the DSP gags. So, any vol pedal in that chain will affect the whole amp.

Generic Dreadhead

TroutMask wrote: »

Just read your manual and it looks like a bog-standard fx loop: normalled pre-out and power amp in. Looks like their expression pedal only controls the DSP gags. So, any vol pedal in that chain will affect the whole amp.

The expression pedal sucks (it's using an internet style cable and gives of a high pitched squeak permanently)

The effects chain is going:
Guitar ->
Comp - Octave - Wah - Phaser - Para EQ ->
Noise Supressor - (2 different dirt loops on a switcher both within the loop of the Noise Supressor) - Post Dirt EQ -> Amp Input
FX Loop send -> [Possible location of Foot Volume] - Loop pedal with all time based and modulation effects - Boss RC Looper -> FX Return -> Your ears :pac:

I hope that helps somewhat. It's all terribly confusing when you are dealing with pre-amp stompboxes, effects in the loop, passive and active pickups.

TroutMask

Sounds like a cool technical challenge.

One thing is clear though - if you put the volume pedal in the FX loop, it will have no bearing whatsoever on the amp input and the loading on your PUPs. This is because the FX loop is essentially isolated from the Input preamp stage. You can do anything you like in the FX loop and the impedance presented to the PUP will stay the same.

A vol pedal might give weird results in the FX loop - and this would be down to the way the volume pedal is wired. It should be OK, but I don't know Line 6 stuff that well. The worst (unlikely) case is that the input of the vol pedal is wired to go short in the 'lowest vol' position - and the FX send buffer* will sulk. This is unlikely - so give it a go and see how you get on. You might also hear the amp's tone change as you bring up and down the pedal.

*buffer = a little unity-gain amp stage designed to isolate grounds & keep things clean. Allows for long/complex chains due to the impedance matching.

Generic Dreadhead

TroutMask wrote: »

Sounds like a cool technical challenge.

One thing is clear though - if you put the volume pedal in the FX loop, it will have no bearing whatsoever on the amp input and the loading on your PUPs. This is because the FX loop is essentially isolated from the Input preamp stage. You can do anything you like in the FX loop and the impedance presented to the PUP will stay the same.

A vol pedal might give weird results in the FX loop - and this would be down to the way the volume pedal is wired. It should be OK, but I don't know Line 6 stuff that well. The worst (unlikely) case is that the input of the vol pedal is wired to go short in the 'lowest vol' position - and the FX send buffer* will sulk. This is unlikely - so give it a go and see how you get on. You might also hear the amp's tone change as you bring up and down the pedal.

*buffer = a little unity-gain amp stage designed to isolate grounds & keep things clean. Allows for long/complex chains due to the impedance matching.

I have a couple of Boss pedals (CS-3, OC-3, PH-2 and NS-2) in there Pre-Dirt acting as Buffers.
Do you think I should put the FootVolume in the Pre-Amp chain in that case?

TroutMask

You could try it. Maybe experiment - so long as the first thing the PUPs see is either a steady impedance (the input to an amp - or a pedal, buffered or unbuffered), then tone changes due to varying impedance are not going to be an issue.
I'm currently experimenting with a loop involving a vintage Tel-Ray Morley and some DDL fx. I gotta say, even though the Tel-Ray introduces a residual impedance of about 100 ohms in the fully on position; it is by far the smoothest and most awesome volume pedal I've tried.

Personally I'm not an advocate of introducing buffers and/or buffered FX all over the place - I ripped all that buffer stuff out of my Dunlop Wah and it sounded a lot better. There are times when the use of buffers becomes unavoidable - like when there's a long distance between pedals and amps, or where ground loops are an issue. I especially dislike the Boss IC-based buffer stages - that's just me though - and I'm going into a couple of really nice handwired amps.

Generic Dreadhead

Soooooo.
As long as the 1st pedal after my guitar signal isn't the volume pedal, then it doesn't make a difference?
You see I haven't actually bought the pedal yet, so I need to know if i should buy High or Low impedance. Which one will serve both PUPs (provided the signal is buffered)

TroutMask

Pretty much what i said. Yes, if another pedal is the first thing the PUP sees, then impedance-related tone gnarlies won't be an issue there.

The Volume pedal could cause tone issues somewhere else, but it won't be PUP-loading related (though tone issues could be caused by, say, loading a pedal in a weird way).

An idea could be to ask the mod to move this thread to 'Instruments' where there are more amp people