You can definitely get a little mid boost that way with the Voight, though it is a wide-band boost, not narrow and peaky.
You can also get a little mid-scoop if you do the opposite, turn both bass and treble to maximum. Again, it is not deep and narrow like the Fender tone stack, but rather wide-band.
Another thing I like about the Voight is that it has an almost perfectly flat frequency response when both bass and treble are turned about half-way. If you like the raw sound of your amp, this tone control won't change it in the centre setting.
I've wondered if it would be worth adding a separate mid control (not part of the Voight, but between two other stages of the amp.) I haven't tried it, though.
-Gnobuddy
yeah, i've seen the curves in the voight schematic that you've posted... i think it could be of worth adding a mids control if it could have a major effect such as a violent mid scoop or a proeminent mid spike
i have a question... what could happen if the 2m2 resistor in the bass pot wiper gets decreased to 2m or 1m? can the voight be more mids focused or benefit from less insertion loss?
no complaints btw... its better than the baxandall i had previously installed in the pedal, it seems to have taken off some extreme aspect that kept the pedal a bit odd and too muddy before voight...
I remember tinkering with all the resistor values in LTSpice - a lot - until I finally got frequency responses that looked about right in the simulation. Then I built and tried it, and liked it.But I don't remember exactly what changes when you change only that one resistor.
My (somewhat faint) memory is that this circuit was rather hard to tweak, because everything interacts with everything else. When I changed one capacitor or resistor, it would often improve one thing, but make something else worse.
I just looked up my LTSpice folder. It contains 26 different versions of this tone control, starting with the one in Blencowe's book, and then 25 different tweaks by me.
My memory is that Blencowe's version of the Voight did have less insertion loss. But, with a passive tone control, less insertion loss also means less control range. Since a passive circuit has no gain, you cannot actually boost the signal when you turn up, say, the bass control. All you can do is go from lots of insertion loss to less insertion loss.
So if there is only 6 dB insertion loss with the controls set flat, then the maximum boost you can get is also only 6 dB, and probably only 4 or 5 dB in practice.
I wanted a lot more control range (cut / boost) , and so I kept tweaking in that direction, until I finally got what I considered enough control range. But that inevitably came along with more insertion loss.
If you are able to run some flavour of Spice on your phone or computer, you could always try to see if you can improve the circuit to suite yourself better. Me, I chased the Holy Grail of passive tone controls through 25 different tweaks, and finally made myself stop. Othewise when I am too old to play guitar any more, I will still be bent over LTSpice, tweaking a resistor here and a capacitor there, looking for the perfect passive tone control!
The active Baxandall circuit became the standard in Hi-Fi because it did many things right: frequency response was almost perfectly flat when you set both knobs to the centre, bass and treble knobs do not interact at all, you can get plenty of cut and boost if you want, cut and boost curves are smooth and symmetrical.
So when I began tinkering with the Voight, I was trying to achieve those same things. I didn't achieve all of them - for example, the cut curves are slightly different from the boost curves - but I came closer than any other passive tone control circuit I have tried so far. (That includes the passive Baxandall, which behaves quite badly in my LTSpice simulations. Nothing like the active Baxandall, which is almost perfect.)
Some day I may try an active Baxandall in a guitar amp, maybe it will an even better job than the Voight. The trick is to arrange the preamp circuit in such a way that the active tone control can never be overdriven or clipped. If you clip an active tone control, Very Bad Things happen!
-Gnobuddy
I remember tinkering with all the resistor values in LTSpice - a lot - until I finally got frequency responses that looked about right in the simulation. Then I built and tried it, and liked it.But I don't remember exactly what changes when you change only that one resistor.
My (somewhat faint) memory is that this circuit was rather hard to tweak, because everything interacts with everything else. When I changed one capacitor or resistor, it would often improve one thing, but make something else worse.
I just looked up my LTSpice folder. It contains 26 different versions of this tone control, starting with the one in Blencowe's book, and then 25 different tweaks by me.
My memory is that Blencowe's version of the Voight did have less insertion loss. But, with a passive tone control, less insertion loss also means less control range. Since a passive circuit has no gain, you cannot actually boost the signal when you turn up, say, the bass control. All you can do is go from lots of insertion loss to less insertion loss.
So if there is only 6 dB insertion loss with the controls set flat, then the maximum boost you can get is also only 6 dB, and probably only 4 or 5 dB in practice.
I wanted a lot more control range (cut / boost) , and so I kept tweaking in that direction, until I finally got what I considered enough control range. But that inevitably came along with more insertion loss.
If you are able to run some flavour of Spice on your phone or computer, you could always try to see if you can improve the circuit to suite yourself better. Me, I chased the Holy Grail of passive tone controls through 25 different tweaks, and finally made myself stop. Othewise when I am too old to play guitar any more, I will still be bent over LTSpice, tweaking a resistor here and a capacitor there, looking for the perfect passive tone control!
The active Baxandall circuit became the standard in Hi-Fi because it did many things right: frequency response was almost perfectly flat when you set both knobs to the centre, bass and treble knobs do not interact at all, you can get plenty of cut and boost if you want, cut and boost curves are smooth and symmetrical.
So when I began tinkering with the Voight, I was trying to achieve those same things. I didn't achieve all of them - for example, the cut curves are slightly different from the boost curves - but I came closer than any other passive tone control circuit I have tried so far. (That includes the passive Baxandall, which behaves quite badly in my LTSpice simulations. Nothing like the active Baxandall, which is almost perfect.)
Some day I may try an active Baxandall in a guitar amp, maybe it will an even better job than the Voight. The trick is to arrange the preamp circuit in such a way that the active tone control can never be overdriven or clipped. If you clip an active tone control, Very Bad Things happen!
-Gnobuddy
all i care in a tone stack is a mountain shaped curve increasing from 70 to peak at 1800 to faintly decrease til reach 10k
btw i was tweaking the TSC in the web that our fellow Printer2 introduced to me, i found that my blackheart tone stack (marshall based) have more mids with all controls on 0 rather than all on 0 with mid on 10, lol
then since the presence control cuts bass in the PI, i've found bliss by zeroing everything with presence on 4 with 1n8 cap
back to baxandall stacks... i've found heaven with the following parameters:
pots: 1m (who cares for 1m carbon resistor noise anyway... i keep it zeroed)
rIN: none
r1: 100ohms
r3: 22k
r4: 100k
rL 2m (i am considering if 5db insertion loss is worth of 2m resistor noise)
c1: 1n
c2: 2n
c3: 470pf
c4: 4n7
this Voight you've presented to us is your holy one, or you kept it a secret? thats ok if you kept btw..
i show my findings because my magic is in the fingers + brain + heart + soul... believe me, theres some jerks in my country that dared to copy my style in the past, i've had to ask my father in law to provide a lawyer, but when the lawyer said the price, i realized i couldnt afford it... the good thing is that the copycats gave up on music and the stuff they copied sounded crappy when they played it. all the 4 different bands, 1 in rio, 1 in sao paulo and 2 from my redneck hometown
even registering the songs and the tabs/lyrics theres fools who doesnt show respect even when we go light asking nicely to behave... its either sad and funny, sometimes... i quit getting mad at it btw, i'm pushing through the philosophy of: "wanna threat me, come and kill me then, do you want me to sharp your tool and turn my back to make it easier?"
*laughs badly*
That sounds like the EQ curve of a wha-wha pedal. Have you tried using one? There have been many guitarists who used one as their "tone control", simply setting it to their preferred sound and leaving it there the whole time.
I have two flavours of the Voight that I ended up with, one for clean tones, one for distorted ones. Neither one is secret - in this thread I posted the one I use for clean tones, but I will post the other one if you want to see it. There are only slight differences.
This business of people wanting to keep everything secret is actually an issue that I have strong feelings about. Almost everything that I know (even how to tie my own shoe-laces), I had to learn from someone else. If my mother hadn't shared her knowledge of shoe-laces with me, I would still be tripping over my own shoe-laces.
It takes a super-genius to invent the first knot, the first wheel, the first boat, the first written language, the first musical instrument, the scientific method, the mathematics of digital signal processing. Most of us invent very little, if anything, in our entire lives. Without the shared knowledge of those super-geniuses who came before us, we would still be living as we did 200,000 years ago, hiding in caves and trying not to get eaten by a tiger (maybe a jaguar, if you're in Brazil.
) The fact is that when people hoard their knowledge and keep it secret, the human race progress very slowly, or not at all. All you have to do is look back at early history, when books were too rare or too expensive, and so most of the population was extremely ignorant.
So I'm not the secretive type. If I find or create something I enjoy, or which is useful to me, I want to share it so other people can enjoy and use it, too. The world has enough problems already, we don't need to make things worse by being selfish and secretive and slowing down even what little progress we are making now.
Agreed. Heck, all I have to do is change to a different type of guitar pick, and everything sounds different...the "perfect" tone control setting is no longer perfect. And even if I change nothing, what sounds perfect on Sunday may not sound perfect on Monday - my ears and brain have changed their opinions overnight.
Sorry for your troubles. We human beings are not in general a very nice species. All you have to do is look back at the last few thousand years of our history. And dreamers and creative people often tend to fit very poorly into the general mix.
-Gnobuddy
That sounds like the EQ curve of a wha-wha pedal. Have you tried using one? There have been many guitarists who used one as their "tone control", simply setting it to their preferred sound and leaving it there the whole time.
I have two flavours of the Voight that I ended up with, one for clean tones, one for distorted ones. Neither one is secret - in this thread I posted the one I use for clean tones, but I will post the other one if you want to see it. There are only slight differences.
This business of people wanting to keep everything secret is actually an issue that I have strong feelings about. Almost everything that I know (even how to tie my own shoe-laces), I had to learn from someone else. If my mother hadn't shared her knowledge of shoe-laces with me, I would still be tripping over my own shoe-laces.
It takes a super-genius to invent the first knot, the first wheel, the first boat, the first written language, the first musical instrument, the scientific method, the mathematics of digital signal processing. Most of us invent very little, if anything, in our entire lives. Without the shared knowledge of those super-geniuses who came before us, we would still be living as we did 200,000 years ago, hiding in caves and trying not to get eaten by a tiger (maybe a jaguar, if you're in Brazil.
The fact is that when people hoard their knowledge and keep it secret, the human race progress very slowly, or not at all. All you have to do is look back at early history, when books were too rare or too expensive, and so most of the population was extremely ignorant.
So I'm not the secretive type. If I find or create something I enjoy, or which is useful to me, I want to share it so other people can enjoy and use it, too. The world has enough problems already, we don't need to make things worse by being selfish and secretive and slowing down even what little progress we are making now.
Agreed. Heck, all I have to do is change to a different type of guitar pick, and everything sounds different...the "perfect" tone control setting is no longer perfect. And even if I change nothing, what sounds perfect on Sunday may not sound perfect on Monday - my ears and brain have changed their opinions overnight.
Sorry for your troubles. We human beings are not in general a very nice species. All you have to do is look back at the last few thousand years of our history. And dreamers and creative people often tend to fit very poorly into the general mix.
-Gnobuddy
thats ok... and when i said 'copied my style' it was a discrete way to say that the whole song was mercilessy copied LOL
i agree with your quote on everything said, and i think this is the purpose of this forum... to bring evolution or revolution to audio
we pick something mediocre and make it better
or sometimes we dare to pick some 'sacred' designs and discuss trying not always to improve it, but maybe tune in our demanding parameters;
i think the difference from copying a musician's work (many write songs that came from pain, many sacrifice alot and even starve... i've seen and heard it) and modding a commercial unit that we've purchased allows us to say with conviction that its positive for mankind to accept that we can invent little and work together through empirical knowledge
but i think sometimes if we copy from scratch some electronic design that a professional worked hard for it can be compared to any other worthy artwork that deserves respect
about the wah thing... i have never considered this point of view, yet i dont even know that a wah does this kind of thing *laughs*
all i knew is that it rolled the tone and gain as we engage the pot with the pedal mechanism based by a pinned belt torquing a clutch shaped axis of the pot;
i ain't sure if all wahs change gain, but i heard that the most prehistoric units did behave very similar to a simple tone pot;
my former (first and only) guitar teacher showed me some magic tricks with the little, pinkey finger and the tone or volume pots, but i found it hard and paid little attention at the time, changing the lesson subject to: sonic youth's noise technics and how fun we can have by rubbing the whole guitar fretboard with strings on the speakers cabinet's edge at loud volume and high gain...
we do it for the sake of fun, theres no point playing something boring for some boring reasons
thats why i find myself in the soldering iron surgeries... because when i finish the mod, its really rewarding to feel the touch interaction, response and sound of an instrument / device fine-tuned in such degree that no money can buy or no other can do it except ourselves
about the wah thing... i have one, i've tested some in my life... there was a friend of mine that owned a shop and he let me test many stuff many many stuff really
in the present i'm very happy with the crybaby dimebag from hell DB-01
no other brand or model can do what this thing does... i will refrain mentioning very strong boutique names here to respect their products and they're awesome, to be honest the C*yd* d-l-xe from a very known brand is better tone-wise and headroom-wise, but no other wah besides DB-01 can shape so violently and focused the waves...
i mainly used wah to mask bad technique and supressing feedback at that little 1 second during a improvisation solo when we need to breathe (or lets say shrink/stretch the coil to make a bigger jump) by backing the heel;
introducing gain/ violence by pressing toes forward;
or swing back and forth to roughly shred the waveform (and this is the main reason i've chosen the DB-01)
... yet speaking of the 'devil' its the only device that i gave up modding and accepted it stock... i've planned to feed it 18v to make it sound thicker, clearer, meaner, but the dunlop customer service told me theres sensitive components that have tight tolerances to run safely @9v
well... what a bummer, right? at least it came stock with 2 isolated outputs that let me run it stereo on 2 amps, so this feature was my 'sucker lollipop' to accept and stick with it the way it was designed
but the bottle rocket, turbo rat and amps really-rawlly benefitted alot from modding.
not that the design was flawed or something, but i saw a different possibility into it to amuse me even more while i slam the strings in a very psycho, yet lucid pattern;
...
c'mon, show us your holy grail tonestack for gain/overdrive
i think now you are sure dat ur dealin' with a dirty boy
no clean tones for me X_x it would reveal my flaws and bad playing
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Exactly, but if you don't move the pot, you just get a peak sitting there in the frequency response. I remember reading about some famous guitarist who used to use his wah-wah like this, as a fixed EQ.
I think Jeff Beck is the absolute master of these "volume swells" with the pinky. He can make a 'Strat sound like whalesong. Absolutely incredible.
I rarely play a 'Strat, and have never mastered these volume swells with the pink. They don't work on my guitars, which have volume and tone controls further from the bridge, so your finger can't reach them without moving your entire right hand.
Well, the clip you posted earlier of you and your wife jamming made me think of an imaginary event, a young Cream-era Eric Clapton jamming with the Grateful Dead.
The attached screenshot shows both my Voight variations in a single large image. The overdrive version has smaller capacitor values for C1 and C3, that's the only difference. If you look at the EQ curves, the clean version is centered around 400 Hz, while the overdrive version is centered a little higher, around 600 Hz.
If you like you can also use C1 = 220 pF, C3 = 1.8 nF (same as 1800 pF), which will move the curves even higher in frequency, centering them at around 900 Hz.
The idea behind this is that there are more high frequencies present in the overdriven signal, so the balance of the signal shifts towards treble, and so the bass needs more control range, and the treble needs less control range to keep it from becoming too harsh.
I have no idea if you will like any of these changes, but at least, it only costs you two capacitors and a few minutes with a soldering iron to find out...
I also wouldn't call either of these my Holy Grail tone stacks (as you know, I don't believe the Holy Grail exists.) But certainly these Voight tone controls are my personal favourites among all passive tone controls I've tried, though I still see flaws in them.
-Gnobuddy
Attachments
Voighting away
I've seen versions of the Voight with a resistor between C3 and the output (see this music-electronics-forum post). Redundant in your version, I presume, based on the curves.
Thanks again.
I've seen versions of the Voight with a resistor between C3 and the output (see this music-electronics-forum post). Redundant in your version, I presume, based on the curves.
That's interesting - I wonder what it does? I believe that is the original version created by Voight himself to "lift the bass" while playing records, and published in Wireless World magazine some years before WWII.
I got my first glimpse of a Voight tone control schematic in Merlin Blencowe's preamp book, and it must not have had that additional resistor. At least, I don't remember it.
It took a lot of tweaking to get those curves at least somewhat symmetrical, reasonably proportional to pot rotation, and with adequate control range and minimal control interaction. Still, the knobs are somewhat less effective near maximum cut, and there is some slight change in mid-band gain as you go from full cut to full boost.
It would be nice if the additional resistor can reduce any of those minor imperfections even further (though it looks as though it's effect will depend on the input impedance of the next audio stage in the chain, which I'm not thrilled about.)
Today and tomorrow are both going to be busy days, but perhaps I will try adding the extra resistor in LTSpice to see what it does when I can find the time. Keeping in mind not to pursue the elusive Holy Grail for too long...
-Gnobuddy
Exactly, but if you don't move the pot, you just get a peak sitting there in the frequency response. I remember reading about some famous guitarist who used to use his wah-wah like this, as a fixed EQ.
I think Jeff Beck is the absolute master of these "volume swells" with the pinky. He can make a 'Strat sound like whalesong. Absolutely incredible.
I rarely play a 'Strat, and have never mastered these volume swells with the pink. They don't work on my guitars, which have volume and tone controls further from the bridge, so your finger can't reach them without moving your entire right hand.
Well, the clip you posted earlier of you and your wife jamming made me think of an imaginary event, a young Cream-era Eric Clapton jamming with the Grateful Dead.
The attached screenshot shows both my Voight variations in a single large image. The overdrive version has smaller capacitor values for C1 and C3, that's the only difference. If you look at the EQ curves, the clean version is centered around 400 Hz, while the overdrive version is centered a little higher, around 600 Hz.
If you like you can also use C1 = 220 pF, C3 = 1.8 nF (same as 1800 pF), which will move the curves even higher in frequency, centering them at around 900 Hz.
The idea behind this is that there are more high frequencies present in the overdriven signal, so the balance of the signal shifts towards treble, and so the bass needs more control range, and the treble needs less control range to keep it from becoming too harsh.
I have no idea if you will like any of these changes, but at least, it only costs you two capacitors and a few minutes with a soldering iron to find out...
I also wouldn't call either of these my Holy Grail tone stacks (as you know, I don't believe the Holy Grail exists.) But certainly these Voight tone controls are my personal favourites among all passive tone controls I've tried, though I still see flaws in them.
-Gnobuddy
a long time ago i did try this wah trick in the intro of a song... the band name was Autof*c-k and the song was Wild Kid... the wah was a 535q (my granpa bought it for me and the dime wah's price was twice than the 535q... even granpa been wealthy, i had no balls to drag a big income from the old man)
this is the song on link below... its a very old song... we were mere teenagers, i kind of get ashamed a little because of the chicken-like vocals and cheap brazilian accent with poor lyrics, but the guitar intro is a good example of what i mean... really dont mind this song... it was about a decade ago!
YouTube
i did choose to use the fixed wah setting on the song due to the synthetic aspect it gave to the tone...
the dime wah is unsuited to be used as a fixed tone control because its very extreme... even for some jazzy/bluesy solos i refrain from enganging the unit, but someday i'll look forward to experience this idea on some clyde wah
i dont listen to Jeff Beck, but i respect his work and consider him a visionary on music, his approach to guitar with no pick, using fingers is one of the things that i found coolest and i tried it for some time, since i am a 4 string bass player, but my 4 fingers pizzicato + thumb on slapping werent much of an improvement to guitar playing;
my stratocaster's volume is disabled hahah! it was tough when accidentally the knob got changed in the middle of a performance, although i dont like strats... short story: back on the Dot/335 days i needed a solidbody and couldnt afford any... then, miraculously a dude needed cash and offered me a handmade by Seizi Tagima, identical to Fender, one piece body with great brazilian wood and thin rosewood fretboard (japanese style) for equivalent to 150 dollars... i had to jump it on and didnt mind it was a strat by then
(luckly i traded some reel to reel made in germany plus alot of other things for a Modern Player Jazzmaster with mahogany body and cool SG crimson paint, loaded with some duncans, so i dont need to play the Strat anymore... yay! but i keep it anyway 'cause its a part of Brazilian Luthery history...)
I also don't listen to Cream, but I love this live vid of Sunshine of Love
YouTube
its like the beginning of Stoner/Psychodelic era such as Grand Funk Railroad / Paranoid or the early swedish band Graveyard or even... Liquid Sound Company
for overdrives, its better to cut a little of bass... more clarity... i think 'thickness' comes from midrange, not low bass...
about the holy grail... the more we search for it, farther we get from it... the more we tweak into something, more we find ourselves wondering about the 'and if'
yeah... such bee-autiful curves
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