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Why Would I Want A Volume Pedal?

As a steel player you won´t get around a decent volume pedal for playing with expression .

To my experience (and I had quite a few volume pedals...) no two specimen (not even two equal types from different era´s) react the same on a given displacement, which makes it harder to control the effect. The reason is that most of them, at least the vintage style, uses a potentiometer of some sort as rotation detection unit whit whatever mechanism translating this into a linear displacement. There is a plethora of different rotational law potentiometers that try to linearize this movement, so that you can have at least a predictable volume change over the pedal travel of interest, letting alone a perceived linear change.

Pot pedals generally suffer from the following drawbacks:

• Pot laws give volume changes far from being perceived linear (note: some like this...)
• linear mechanical displacement does not necessarily mean perceived (due to the logarithmic hearing action) linear volume change
• pots wear quickly (become scratchy) and the pot you have in there may not be available any more or just for exorbitant prices. Pots were never meant to be used like that, although large vintage type pots last much longer.
  
• traditional pedals are built like tanks and are very heavy.
  
• vintage shape pedals are very high in profile. They raise your playing position unduly.
  
• traditional models have no adjustable heel-back position

Funny aside: some  beginners course´s advice was to put an (empty) nine volt battery block (just for the shape and availability of it) under the heel-back end of the pedal to stop you from cutting the volume too much down during the learning process...

• bare pot pedals may be perceived as tone sucking

Passive pedals are still built the way they were 50 years ago, guitar > pot > amplifier.
The guitar "sees" a 500k Ohm impedance or thereabouts. Let´s assume a 1m cord between guitar and pedal, this would amount to some 150 pF capacity with a typical modern average cable. Now this may not hurt your tone much. However, if you use a long cable, say 5m, this would certainly do something to tone. That said, the long cable after the volume pedal will add to the load capacitance and make it much worse which deteriorates even more if you lower the volume (this has been discussed at length here ^[1]). You need a buffer immediately after the volume pedal (read: ideally inside) to eliminate tone sucking. Unfortunately, electrical units of what sort ever always need to be impedance matched and ideally have a high impedance buffer on the inside and a low impedance drive to the outside. This is what all modern electrical volume pedals have - and all digital ones.

A practical fix to lift a pot pedal sonically to contemporary standards:

if you already own  such a pedal and insist on it, you might as well fix it, if you are good at soldering. Add a small D.I.Y. double buffer (or one you can get from PCBmania for example) into the pedal case with a suitable battery holder. Buffer input and output and sound good. Note that this does not liberate you from the pot wear problem.
You may also add a 50k (lin) pot to the ground side of the volume pot for a heel-back volume preset.

I do generally advise against pot pedals.

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Optical Pedals

Makers like Morley quickly responded to the pot wear problems with their optical pedals, using a photoelement of sorts as the control element, where a light source coming from a bulb or LED was varying obscured by some barrier connected to the moving part of the pedal.

While this did indeed away with wear, it introduced new problems.

• vactrols or photoresistors have their own law too, meaning the way they change resistance with exposure.
  
• They tried to counteract this by giving the obscuring part a determined shape (sometimes even just a piece of tapering cardboard), which worked so-so.
• Those units were notorious for their current demand and clumsy
• They were in their simplest form notorious tone-suckers too until they buffered them.

To fix those problems, you may have to add some buffering as described above. I do generally advise against those pedals.

Modern Fancy Volume Pedals

Modern, boutique pedals are usually digital, at least partially, and of high sonic quality.

• buffered inherently
  
• no-wear (digital control element)
• selectable laws
• prohibitive price tags
  

Who would want a ball-and-chain back once you got rid of it?

Of course, you can set heel back volume and all that.

Out of necessity, since my "official" PSG volume pedal had gone scratchy after a while of non-usage and could not be coaxed into working again, and slowly getting cooked over the endless rigmarole of finding, purchasing and swapping pots in futility, I used my Digitech RP-500 multi-fx-processor to serve as fancy volume pedal.
Now that is some overkill - two high-bore DSP processors doing nothing.

It turns out that its expression pedal, which can be wired up to control different parameters, is extremely useful in several ways.

• excellent mechanical feel. No slippage, maintains a selected position. Perfect non-obtrusive positive friction during movement. Noiseless, no quirks.
• perfect tone. There is no perceivable degradation of tone. This is no challenge for a DSP of that caliber. I do not believe in any tone degradation anybody can hear with a contemporary system like this.
  
• Adjustable heel-back position (minimum volume preset). Have a different one on each patch if you like. This changes the feeling of the pedal a lot and relieves a great burden for a beginner to medium player, since you get what you want without having to gain perfection in controlling the volume pedal.
• smooth "linear" and predictable volume change over the mechanical range. I like it like that, some like it steep towards the end. The steeper it gets the more precise you need to be.
  
• non-wear (digital encoder)
• corrrect input and output impedances

The Other Benedictions: FX Galore

We have not yet addressed the other effects a typical SG player of today wants.
Back in the times of Jerry Byrd, all they had was a spring reverb at best, or a tape delay if they went fancy.

There are some outstanding recordings being made with just that, and that is something, a modern DSP can do with one hand tied to the back. In fact, with both hands tied to the back. The times of grainy digital reverbs are long gone.

Keeping in mind, that the majority of steel players rants about the Boss Delay/Reverb pedal, which is a plain simple analog effect that certainly has compromises. A DSP can do all that. And, in the light of the Boss et al., don´t try to argue that DSP´s are tone suckers. Not for that simple stuff.

I agree, that a DSP may not excel at simulating complex non-linear stuff like overdriven tube stacks or the like, but it does all linear and time-based effects like reverb, delay, tremolo and the like very well. Note that the most fancy contemporary stand alone time-manipulation effects are DSP-based.

So your plethora of:

• phasers
• flangers
• choruses
  
• analog and digital delays
• reverbs
• tremolos
• etc.

When you move your pedal´s position relatively to the knee forward or backward, your leg will be either tilted forward or backward. In both extreme positions, your foot´s angle relative to the leg has to cover a different range of angles in order to go through the pedal´s travel. Try it. A position too far back will force your foot to resume a very steep upwards angle (toes raised) in the heel-back position, whereas a position too far forward will require your foot to stretch out too flat. Both are uncomfortable. You want to maintain a very comfortable foot position as to introduce as little distraction as possible, if you are free to choose.

Besides that, your knee may introduce a vertical motion if your ankle´s pivoting point does not coincide with the pedals pivoting point, which is particularly disturbing if playing a lap-steel and looks ridiculous. I found that having your leg straight upon toe-down, with the pivoting points aligned, works best as a starting position.

While this all may be easily adjusted for a lap-steel player, it is problematic on a PSG due to limited space. Volume pedals are made for a certain operating conditions, and those are clearly not optimized for the PSG.

1. All of them come out too high. You may sit at a bare PSG and may beautifully reach all controls, but you´d have to raise your PSG (and of course your seat) unduly in order to being able to accomodate your legs under it once you add the volume pedal. This also makes your left foot´s position lower than the right by that amount, and for one of them it is not optimal.
   
2. The volume pedal activation angle is not optimal. Sitting at the PSG you tend to sit close up front, which brings your lower leg automatically into a position where a heel back foot position is uncomfortable to sustain. A volume pedal that was higher on the heel side and operates "downwards" were much more comfortable.
   
3. Ease of operation for the knee levers becomes impaired, when you move your upper leg closer to the lever´s pivoting point (law of levers). Conversely, if you raise the guitar enough to have optimum leverage on the right side, your left side knee levers´ activation will be impaired. You are too low, where the displacement becomes bigger.
4. Your footwear´s height is a factor too. If you can´t live without your cowboy boots, take them into account.
   

It becomes quite clear that the volume pedal was a later add-on that was never responded to with subsequent PSG design. It is amazing how people get used to a ball-and-chain. Ideally, both knees should be at the same plane, and indeed, the PSG is layed out for that. A riser kit should account for your size, not the volume pedal´s size.
Again, I recommend to never buy a pedal that is not low profile for PSG.There is a good article in Steel Guitar World forum on that subject^[3] .

While we are talking steel...
I recently wondered why they have omitted the controls on PSG´s. I often use them on my lap-steels and always retrofit them on my PSGs. I found a lot of controversy on the web:
 
Myth #1: I do not need a volume control on my PSG, I have a volume pedal.
Answer:

Your volume pedal is ideally used as an expression pedal. Yes you may use it to mute the signal once you cut it right back in playing pauses, but it certainly makes no sense to have one to just set your target volume and leave it at that.

All pedals have some "law" incorporated in them, meaning how volume changes with a certain physical displacement. This feeling might not be constant over the travel, so once you are further back, the whole feeling might have changed, let alone a different "muscle-mind-map" that has to be entrained due to a different foot pivot range. Some might have gotten used to that. But some eventually also get used to a ball and chain.

Ideally (if you are using it as expression pedal), you set your target volume on your steel, then use your volume pedal like your foot is used to.

Myth #2: My volume control (on the steel) is tone sucking.
Answer:

No it is not. It is the lack of impedance matching (see above: pot pedals, and^[1]). Use a simple buffer.

Myth #3: My tone control (on the steel) cuts too much treble.
Answer:

Use a smaller tone cap. The usual 22nF or even bigger are way too big to be useful. Once turned fully up, the influence of the tone control is negligible.

Myth #4: I have to always bypass my controls because they suck tone.
Answer:

After bypassing those you have a lower impedance (pickup impedance only and somewhat less cable influence, but still not the great tone you could have. Revisit Myth#2.

Myth #5: I don´t need a tone control, I shape my tone later.
Answer:

• Depends on the setup. Local post-buffer controls may work for some.
  

• Wrong in case of Hawaiian Music. Jerry Byrd explicitly explains why he has treble down, and true, you need a mellow tone there. The guitar alone may sound too dull to you, but it will sound great in band context. Also depends if you use a reverb that is bright (a.k.a. liveliness)

• Wrong for Speedy West Boo-Wah (faux wah) effects^[2].
  

Myth #6: Most 6 stringers (standard guitar-) players don´t use their tone control either.
Answer:

Plain wrong. It has been documented to times way back to the beginnings of electric guitar that tone controls have been used extensively for sculpting tone prior to further processing^[1] for good reasons.

Observation#1: The controls on the steels sound different than later controls (amp or fx unit)
Explanation:

True because a) they may be different electrical circuits (passive controls are first order filters)
and b) local controls always interact with the pickup (damping/resonance). This is something active filters cannot do.
Remedy: Try a buffer. Passive controls do have their merit.

Observation#2: The makers have stopped putting controls on their guitars since a while.
Explanation:

Changes are very slow in musical industry and mistakes have a tendency to be perpetuated endlessly ("don´t fix it if it is not broken..."). I am thus inclined to believe that they had practical reasons rather than tonal reasons, such as that the controls are physically vulnerable on the butt-end of the guitar, since they are exposed. Note that old PSG´s had some bracket there to protect the knobs...

[2] Boo-Wah is an effect used extensively by Speedy West and others from that era. The player quickly turns the guitar´s
     tone control forward and backward, achieving an effect similar to a wah, although not as pronounced as a dedicated effect. It
     lives from the fact that the tone control´s  capacitor forms a resonant circuit together with the pickup coil directly on-site.

[3]Steel Guitar Forum: Volume Pedal - Choosing Between Standard and Low Profile,
      https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=215070