pots not really controling gain....

[marrstians]

i've built a couple of pedals and it seems that my gain pots don't usually control the gain as much as they should..... on my ff clone it seems to control a little gain but mostly reduces hi end eqs. my tonbender seems to be close to a volume pot and my octavia is very very slight with my gain... am i doing something wrong or is there a better way to control the gain levels...?

[Mike Burgundy]

These should all work just fine. The FF does react a little tonally, but while having heaps of gain variation.
This is strange. Are you sure you have the right value and type of pot, that your wiring cecks out and the pots are of decent quality?
It's very, very hard to say what could cause this based on what we know now, but it seems likely there's a common mistake in all three pedals.

[marrstians]

i have the right values and my wiring looks fine.. what would the type of pot matter? you mean log or linear? i've gotten all my pots from smallbear so they are of good quality....

[C Bradley]

I would suspect that Mike is refering to log Vs. linear pots. For your Fuzz Face and Tone Bender, you would want to have linear taper pots. If you used log pots, your gain would build slowly and then have a sudden increase at the end of it's rotation. If the design called for a log pot and you used a linear pot, the gain would jump quickly at the start of the pots rotation.

Chris B

[marrstians]

that doesn't seem to be my problem.... the pedals just never sound like they clean up much.... still very heavy distortion with the knobs all the way down.... maybe these pedals just don't have a lot of control in them...

[C Bradley]

that doesn't seem to be my problem.... the pedals just never sound like they clean up much.... still very heavy distortion with the knobs all the way down.... maybe these pedals just don't have a lot of control in them...

Yeah, I had the same experience with my Fuzz Face circuit. The 1k fuzz control is useless; it only sounded good at full gain. So, I eliminated that control by wiring a 1k resistor and the bypass cap in parallel and put it in a small B sized box, like a Distortion +.  

Chris B