got a volume pedal for christmas....um....

[greenbass5]

I've always been a bass-cable-amp guy, although, I've been using a compressor lately for some squished slap parts only.

Um, it's a volume pot...so, now I have two. One on my bass and this thing. I guess I could use it for swells at the end of songs maybe? Is this one of those "if you have to ask......" things? Other than using it with my passive J's that have vol/vol/tone, I can't wrap my mind around it. I mostly play my SR5 and Sadowsky 5, which have single volume pots.

Unfortunately, my wife got it for me so I'm trying to resist the temptation to send it back to MF. Cr@p.
What do you guys do with yours? Thanks.

[WyrdoBass]

I think they're mainly for volume changes while you're playing and don't have time to reach down to your vol knob.

[J. Crawford]

Originally Posted by WyrdoBass

I think they're mainly for volume changes while you're playing and don't have time to reach down to your vol knob.

+1

[Swift713]

Swells

[Eduwen]

Maybe you can try that violin like thing some guitar players do, like creating an effect of almost 0 attack.
If you are not intrested in the pedal i dont see whats wrong about changing it for another one. She got you that pedal, because she though it might be useful for you...

[MingusBass]

I don't have a mute switch on my amp and I put my pedal board before my DI. I use the volume pedal to turn down quickly and tune without the signal going to the house. I don't have much time to tune between songs so I find the volume pedal quite useful for this purpose. I'll use the volume pedal for swells occasionally.

[DaveF]

Actually, I really wanted one of those for when I was playing musicals with my Jazz bass...

There's usually long periods of silence in between songs, and with a Jazz there's no master volume knob. I usually blend the two pickups so it's annoying to turn both knobs all the way off and then frantically try to bring them back to the original positions every time a song starts again.

With a volume pedal it would be as simple as rocking my foot back and forth

Also, how about for solos when you need a boost?

[john keates]

I used to use an ME50B and I found I used the expression pedal for volume much more than wah.

If you have a tuner before it, it can be used to tune silently, you can use it as mentioned above for solos etc.

Sometimes I used to be sneaky and do the soundcheck at half volume so I could whack the volume up when I wanted to get heard.

Conversly, I would sometimes use it to turn myself down if there was a passage that needed an aggressive style of playing but where I didn't want to smother everything.

Swelling the sound up sounds great with some distortion or loads of compression but I never found a practical use for it.

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Placing a volume pedal before a delay pedal can create some wonderful whale/whale playing a violin effects. Mainly a volume pedal is for changing volume hands-free; there's countless rock songs where the band will drop their volume suddenly and slowly bring it back up while playing steady eighth notes, and a volume pedal can be an easier solution than trying to control your attack to change volume.

[bassman03]

Check out this thread -> Volume pedal: Yay, or nay?

I was wondering whether it was worth it to get one of these, and some of the reasons here make me wanna get one. I think i'm gonna eventually, but there's some stuff that i wanna get first that is actually not related to bass.... sorry guys...

[MMC]

I've been using one of these for about 4-5 months now and I love it. Mainly for hands free volume changes(try and let go during a jump or a shuffle), but it's nice to be able to change my attack in a song and keep an even volume level and doing swells can be a fun way to change things up from time to time.Mark