overdrive pedals low output, non-diy

[Jmilla]

I am having an odd experience where my zendrive, pot and morning glory pedals have to be dimed to reach unity and in the case of morning glory never gets there. They are just after my tuner which is first I. My board. I have tried different power supplies and cables with no luck. Anyone have any idea why this would happen?

[jimilee]

Have you tried just powering them off the board with nothing else in the chain?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[mauman]

All three should go well above unity, +1 to Jimilee's idea, get that tuner out and just go guitar >> 1 pedal >> amp.  Check for bad cables too.

[matmosphere]

Yeah, definitely try one at a time with nothing else plugged into the power supply.

What is your power supply situation? Isolated, daisy chained? And how much other stuff is on your board?

[Thewintersoldier]

Is this something new that recently started or has it always been like that with these pedals? Are these diy builds or commercial pedals? Seems odd that it's just drive pedals. More info would definitely help. As Matt suggested try one at a time isolated with just the pedal between the guitar and amp and go from there.

[Jmilla]

Will definitely try one by one later today. Power supplies are one spot cs6 and 12 as well as a single wall wart. This did just start recently.

[Willybomb]

I've built a couple of bluesbreaker style clones recently, one was a morning glory, and none of them were overly loud pedals.  I found you needed to have the gain about halfway, which is still cleanish, to get a decent level out of it.

Usually, if you're not getting the amount of volume you think you should, something is grounding out somewhere or not connected properly.  I had a couple of input 3dpt lugs soldered badly and had no gain out of those pedals.

[Jmilla]

After isolating they all work fine by themselves. After some trial and error I noticed that 3 patch cables when plugged in between the tuner and ods cause some volume drop and one doesn't. They are all soldered sp400 with mogami cable that I made. The funny thing is that they test fine in a cable tester. Could I be getting some signal to ground and have them still pass some signal?

[jimilee]

Excellent to hear.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Aleph Null]

After isolating they all work fine by themselves. After some trial and error I noticed that 3 patch cables when plugged in between the tuner and ods cause some volume drop and one doesn't. They are all soldered sp400 with mogami cable that I made. The funny thing is that they test fine in a cable tester. Could I be getting some signal to ground and have them still pass some signal?

I've definitely experienced this with cold or loose solder joints, where the cable tests fine, but the joint causes too much internal resistance or something. It would be interesting to see what an ohmmeter read.

[mauman]

Cable testers are set for pass/fail according to some threshold value.  If a cable has a high-resistance open or intermittent short, cable tester may say it's ok but it can cause trouble.

[Drew Hallenbeck]

At about 1:15 there's a key step that some people miss when stripping the cables. It doesn't apply to ALL cable brands but it might be the problem you're having.
Over the center conductor's insulation, there may be a thin layer of semiconductor material that needs to be peeled back. If this isn't done, and that layer is making any contact with the center conductor, there will be a high impedance short to the shield. It'll probably test fine in a cable tester but will definitely bleed off some of the signal.
Double check your cable to see if you have this layer that needs to be peeled back.