Boss FV-60 volume pedal mod?

[Studiocat]

Hey guys,

I just found an old FV-60 volume pedal kicking around. I tried it out, and it sucks tone very badly. Virtually unusable. Any suggestions, other than hiding it back in the closet?

Cheers
Adam

[mhammer]

There are a couple of things to consider:

1) Volume pedals vary in terms of what they anticipate as an input signal. The chances are pretty good that this anticipates a lower output impedance from whatever is feeding it, since it is for control over stereo outputs from keyboards, processors, etc. What that means is that feeding it a guitar directly will very likely result in tone suckage. If you feed the FV-60 from a pedal, however, after the high output impedance of the guitar is converted to low output impedance by the pedal, the tone suckage shold be greatly reduced.

2) If you want to stick it ahead of everything, or use it as the only device between guitar and amp, then you need to buffer it somehow. A simple FET buffer will do the trick.

3) Because loading effects and corresponding tone suckage increase as volume is turned down, the traditional response is to stick a bypass capacitor between the input and output lugs on the volume control, such that the volume control affects the lows more than it affects the highs, and preserves clarity even as volume is reduced. That's what a lot of SC-pickup gutars use, and is also the basis for the "bright" switch on Fender amps and bright channel on older Marshalls. You might want to try that strategy on the FV-60's pot/s.