Stage One Foot Volume Review







Here's my review of the Stage One volume pedal. This is a potentiometer pedal with a no nonsense straightforward gear driven design. It sells for around $100 plus $10 shipping (see manufacturer's link below). This pedal uses a high quality Dunlop (CTS) potentiometer with a conductive plastic track. No carbon track or element to wear out! This is the newer version of this pot as well that uses easy to solder tab terminals. This is a 470K pot (mine measures 458K). The pot rotation is about 310 degrees and the pedal uses about 260 degrees of this rotation allow the volume to go from audibly fully off to full on. A direct tuner out jack is provided and buffered by a resistor so you can leave an electronic tuner connected full time and tune with with the volume fully off. Although this is a lower cost volume pedal it uses not only the top quality Dunlop pot but Switchcraft jacks. You can check out more construction details in the photos below. One big advantage of this pedal is the low weight. It comes in at about 2 pounds under the weight of most volume pedals.

Pedal Weights:

  • Stage One 1.3 pounds
  • Lehle Mono 90 3.5 pounds
  • Goodrich Model 120 3.1 pounds

Useful links:

Stage One volume pedal manufacturer link

Telonics FP-100 volume pedal review

Lehle Mono Volume 90 review

Hilton volume pedal review

Goodrich LDR2 volume pedal review

Goodrich Model 120 volume pedal with Dunl;op HotPotz








A full song recording with real pedal steel, lead guitar, bass, rhythm guitar and EZDrummer drums. All pedal steel and guitar parts are played through Allen Encore and Fender Sweetwater special edition Princeton Reverb amps (steel in stereo).
Click here to listen to Half As Much


Review Summary

This pedal sounds as good as any pot pedal you can buy at any price. The built-in tuner out jack works well with my Peterson tuner and does not degrade the guitar signal going to the amp. Although it utilizes a gear driven pot system, the action is quite smooth and there is no gear train roughness feedback so it works nearly as smoothly as a string pulley system. I hooked this pedal up and immediately started recording the sound samples below so you can tell that the pedal works smoothly with no user adjustment period. In my experience the pot volume pedals deliver as much crystal clear tone as you'd ever need but also are capable of producing that classic tone you hear on most commercial recordings. I've used and owned a lot of pedals and admit that I prefer the pot pedal tone. If you want more mechanical and electrical features and adjustments there are many fine powered/buffered pedals on the market like the Lehle Mono 90, Telonics, Goodrich Hilton as well as more expensive pot pedals. After spending a week with this pedal I've decided to keep it and my Goodrich model 120 pedal and sell the Lehle.

I should also point out that the pedal off stop point can be adjusted by moving the rear stop post forward or back in its slot! This can be seen in the third picture in the first row of pictures below.





Sound Samples



Here are some sound samples. These were created by placing Shure SM-57 mics in front of the amps, feeding to dual Studio Projects preamps then to a Zoom R24. The Zoom R24 wav files were then ported to Reaper for editing out all the dead space and converted to the 320 kbps mp3 files below.

Selection
Recording Method
 		Comments
Shure SM57
 Initial trial, volume gutting starts sample
Shure SM57
Shure SM57
Shure SM57



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