P/J wired V/V in series

[khutch]

Pretty much all volume controls "short" the input of the following stage to ground. One common exception is the VVT volume controls in parallel wired Jazz basses. Strictly speaking "short" means zero ohms but practically speaking it means a resistance small enough to be indistinguishable from zero ohms to the device under consideration. A pot turned down all the way in a typical single pickup bass presents an input load of somewhere between zero and a few Ohms to the amplifier that is connected to it. This causes no issues at all, in fact the best way to silence a radio receiver which is much higher in gain than a bass amp and which has much greater sensitivity to noise is to short its input.

 

[BlueTalon]

This is 100% incorrect. When you short the input of an amp, what you get is complete silence. There is nothing for the input gain stage to conduct. This is the opposite of having hum or pops or whatnot. If you look at any bass with a master volume pot, the typical wiring is for the wiper terminal to be the output, rather than the input. This is the preferred way of wiring a volume pot, and it reduces output impedance to zero, when the volume is turned all the way down. (The reason you can't do it with dual volume configurations is that the volume pots can't function independently, so the wiper terminals get used as inputs, instead.) Additionally, if you look at instruments with killswitches, the quietest way to wire them is to let them directly short the output jack. Not only is it very common to let your output jack totally short out, it is the most preferable thing you can possibly do to make an instrument quiet when you want it to be.

Pretty much all volume controls "short" the input of the following stage to ground. One common exception is the VVT volume controls in parallel wired Jazz basses. Strictly speaking "short" means zero ohms but practically speaking it means a resistance small enough to be indistinguishable from zero ohms to the device under consideration. A pot turned down all the way in a typical single pickup bass presents an input load of somewhere between zero and a few Ohms to the amplifier that is connected to it. This causes no issues at all, in fact the best way to silence a radio receiver which is much higher in gain than a bass amp and which has much greater sensitivity to noise is to short its input.

First of all, thanks to both of you for attempting to clear my cobwebs. I get what both of you are saying about shorting the bass output to get silence. It's a paradigm shift for me, because I always understood (incorrectly) that silence = open.

So now, regarding line6man's earlier post that there is a resistance across the output, that's what makes it the exception? That's peculiar to the way jazz basses are wired (or any parallel VVT)? If so, that helps explain my confusion, because practically my entire bass playing life has existed in the VVT world. I thought that was the rule, and I didn't know there were any "exceptions". To me, that was the "standard" configuration -- that's definitely not the same thing as the "exception".