Anemic 105Q?

[millahh]

A few months backed, I picked up a cheap 105Q from the classifieds. It had apparenly bee through the war...sheared screws, missing feet, unattached backplate, and plenty of duct (duck?) tape residue. I was able to figure out a decent way to put it together, and put it on my board.

It was more subtle than I expected. On comparison with a couple of web demos, my effect at 100% Q is about 10% of that in the demo. It's a little useful for tone scuplting or getting a (mild) envelope effect, but not much else. Certainly not the sounds I think this should be capable of (Timmy C., etc.). It also seems to distort fairly easily.

The experience is similar with three different instruments ( P with QP/rounds, P with Model P+J/flats, L2K with rounds). I'm running it ahead of my limiter, but there's no difference whether or not that's on. I'm running through a Sansamp PBDDI into a MarkBass 1x12 combo.

Is there something obvious I'm missing, or has a component perhaps gone wonky as a result of years of hard living?

[Caca de Kick]

Something probably did go wonky in it. I have two of these, the first one I bought back around '01 and used it pretty hard. I wore out two off switches in it and the pot seemed to keep going out of adjustment. After years if use it was barely making the wah sweep. So a couple of years ago I bought a new one to replace it, all the sounds I'm familiar with are back to normal and working perfect.

[millahh]

Ok, Thanks. Good to have a better idea of what's going on.

I think I'll play around with the components inside, and see if there isn't something obvious (i.e. if the pot is loose and is rotating a bit during use, which could explain why i'm not getting much of a sweep). And hey, if that doesn't work or I irrevocably screw something up, it was only $30 in the first place.

[millahh]

Thought I'd post my resolution on this, in case anyone searches for the same issue:

I wound up selling the wah, and got an Nano BassBalls instead...and had the same anemic sound on the sweep! I realized that between the inherent mid-scoop on my PBDDI and the mild scoop I had on my amp (I had the BDDI going into the effects retuern, and the EQ was set to be after the effects loop), I was almost completely gutting the affected frequency range...which is weird, because it didn't sound like I was extremely scooped. Anyway, I took out the SansAmp and ran my amp normally, and suddenly the filter sounded as it should! My chorus suddenly came to life as well.

Lesson learned...depleting mids effectively neuters wah and envelope filters.