guitar volume pot

Controlling your Guitar Tone with your Volume Pot

guitar volume potYou can get a variety of tones via your guitar’s volume pot. Here is how it is done:

1) If your amp is cranked and is breaking up nicely, you can roll off your guitar’s volume pot to clean up the tone. This works great with tube amps. It’s also a nice way to do it with lower wattage amps that tend to break up quickly. So with your guitar volume rolled off, you are good to blend in with rhythm parts, and then maxing your guitar volume will help you cut through the mix in solos with a dirty guitar tone.

2) Pedals – some pedals work marvellously for this purpose, especially fuzz pedals. A cranked fuzz pedal can clean up considerably via your guitar’s volume. You can find a whole array of tones with a tiny turn of your guitar’s volume knob. This also works with overdrive pedals.

3) Pick attack – Rolling off your guitar’s volume gives you more leeway to attack your strings harder, creating different tones in itself. If you want to accentuate subtle tones, you can crank your guitar’s volume and pick lightly at the strings.

4) Feeling too much sustain? This can easily be controlled rolling off your guitar’s volume pot.

5) Volume swells – this is a very cool effect. Basically you have your guitar volume all the way off. Then you strum a chord with no volume, and then roll your guitar’s volume up after the strum (can be done smoothly with your pinky finger). This will create a cool volume swell which is great for more ambient-like parts of a song.

By now, you probably get the point. So try some experimenting, and you’ll see how many different things you can do with your guitar just with its volume pot. Don’t forget, you also have a tone pot too ;-).

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