Ernie Ball VP Jr Active Mod

[iamharlan]

Hey all...I've been thinking quite a bit about this whole buffered signal chain, tuner-out tone-suck business...and have decided to mod my Ernie Ball Volume Pedal Jr to make it active. I want to be able to continue to use my tuner-out on the pedal, but also want the benefit of a buffer at the beginning of my chain, as well as no tone-suck from the tuner-out.

So, I've thought about sending it off to one of the boutique guys that do that mod...but I don't really have the time to have it off my board, and I'm fairly handy with a soldering iron. So I'd like to do it myself, but I'm not finding really any resources on how it's done.

Anywhere you guys know I can look? Or any resources you have laying around?

[tjk3052]

I usually use a single op-amp to make a buffer. Here's a good link with some schematics of buffers.

http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/Buffers/

[iamharlan]

Thanks...that's definitely helpful on how the buffers work. But have you seen these actually installed into an Ernie Ball VP Jr?

I'm trying to limit the real estate usage here, and know that I'll always be using a volume pedal of some kind. But on that note...will any buffer that I place before the VP have the same effect as one installed into it? Will that help with the tone-suck problem?

[limbe]

If you have a VP Jr with a 25k pot the setup will be perfect.If you have one with a 250 kohm pot I honestly don´t have any idea how the sweep on the pedal will be.In neither case will your tone suffer.

[fatsound77]

Thru-Tone does the best EB work out there. Check it out! I reviewed his pro mod a while back and still love it. It's more of an overhaul than just an input buffer and it definitely makes all the difference. http://www.thru-tone.com

[limbe]

If you want to make your Ernie Ball volume pedal active there is an Anderton project called volume pedal retrofit that´s meant to do exactly that.You will find the project at
www.tonepad.com
Look in fx projects.