Anyone else absolutely despise internal trimpots/ switches?

[NBarnes21]

I'm definitely a tinkerer and tweaker when it comes to FX but nothing drives me nuts more than pedals having internal trimpots and switches that are only accessible if you take off the back plate. Why not just make it another knob or switch on the surface? I remember when MXR's carbon copy added adjustable modulation via a trimpot and I just thought it would have been so much more useful as a surface control. The Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret was another one where I found myself constantly pulling off the back to make a tweak on one of the trimpots depending on what I was trying to dial in. Who's with me? Just make it a surface control!

[Trout]

Yeah why the fuck are controls inside a pedal

[Embenny]

For sure, settings that a user may want to change more than once should be on the outside of the pedal.

The only thing internal trim pots and dip switches should be used for are one-time/maintenance type adjustments. That way you can't accidentally screw up the voltage you're sending to the diodes, or whatever.

Anything else just makes for a bad user experience. I think some people like the mystique of having "secret" settings that others can't see by looking at the pedal. But honestly, those people are stupid.

[panoramic]

I fucking hate them yes.

[JSett]

I'm gonna go on the other side here. I like a simple pedal. Too many options and I tend to find myself tweaking into oblivion and never being happy....chasing a sound. If there's options to be set inside I can find one I like then easily forget about them forever. Often I don't even look at them at all and leave whatever it is stock. 3 examples of how my brain treats them

• I recently bought a Milkman F-Stop. I know there's 3 dipswitches inside to change the reverb type. I haven't bothered as whatever it's set at now sounds great (and I bought it used, so it could be set to anything, I have no idea).

• I only just opened up my AnalogMan Sunface BART to tweak the input gain. I found myself getting the perfect sounds with the guitar volume tweaked back to about 8. So I set it to be the same with the guitar volume on 10 and sealed it back up. I'll likely never open it again

• I had a Way Huge Swollen Pickle but couldn't live with the fact I couldn't get a sound that worked for me without constant adjustment of the stuff inside. Fuzz pedals should have no more than 3 knobs. Fact. Anything else is missing the point IMHO

TLDR: I can live in ignorant bliss. Put all the dipswitches you want inside, I'm probably never going to even look at them.

[NBarnes21]

I'm gonna go on the other side here. I like a simple pedal. Too many options and I tend to find myself tweaking into oblivion and never being happy....chasing a sound. If there's options to be set inside I can find one I like then easily forget about them forever. Often I don't even look at them at all and leave whatever it is stock.

I'm with you on liking simple pedals, I just think if you're going to make something adjustable it should be easy to adjust. My fav overdrive these days is the Joe Gore Cult and I love how it's just one knob and plays so well with the guitar volume knob. But I admire you to just be content with that reverb pedal as is and that your mind doesn't start wondering what other sounds could be underneath the hood- jealous!

Fuzz pedals should have no more than 3 knobs. Fact. Anything else is missing the point IMHO

I love simple fuzz pedals too but I can't say I agree with you here, take the Fuzz Factory for instance, legendary pedal on loads of great recordings. The velcro fuzz doesn't come out of that thing with out all the different parameters. Horses for courses IMO

[sal paradise]

Friedman BE-OD - perfect pedal except that there’s too much gain as standard, and the gain control only really worked 10-2. Outside of that sounds rubbish.

Rather than an internal trim pot, why did the gain not go from low high like a normal dial?

[JVG]

Over the years, i’ve become less and less enthused about complexity. At one time, a pedal with many knobs and switches would have looked exciting to me, but now it usually just looks like a pain in the arse. (Yes, there are exceptions to every rule/generalisation!).

So, as a general philosophy i’m not keen on internal switches and whatnot. The exceptions are for adjustments which are likely to be ‘once only’ (based on user preference) and therefore perhaps don’t warrant outside real estate.

Examples of internal controls that i feel can be justified are trip pots for overall pedal volume, or switches to select between buffered and true bypass. I definitely don’t need a ‘secret’ switch that turns my reverb pedal into a fuzz (you know what i’m referring to) or anything equally banal.

I’m increasingly seeing pedals with too many controls being the product of designers who either (a) don’t really know what they’re doing, or (b) don’t have the guts to commit to a particular sound and say ‘this is my pedal’. The pitch is that such pedals offer the user an infinite array of possibilities, but my experience is that these pedals usually offer an overwhelming array of mediocre and indistinctive sounds.

Applicable cliches: less is more, quality over quantity.

Wow, i sound like an old bastard

[øøøøøøø]

I’m not a fan of making *everything* a part of user interface. Unless something is wrong, I don’t need real-time control over transistor bias, ring mod carrier frequency rejection, analog delay clock balance, etc. These sorts of things generally just make the device sound broken if misaligned, and require qualified personnel with appropriate test equipment to set optimally.

I know sometimes it can sound cool to have such parameters misaligned, but there are plenty of pedals that allow the user to break them and make circuit-bent squeeps, hisses and gurgles. It was cool when Vex did it a quarter-century ago, but it’s not really novel anymore, and it was only ever useful under the narrowest of circumstances.

At this point, if a device is the type that needs calibrating or fine-tuning for its operation, I generally prefer that the calibration is undertaken by someone who knows how to make the device sound its best.

[marqueemoon]

I think it makes sense for some “set and forget” options. I don’t want a million knobs and switches.

Apparently on the J. Rockett Tranquilizer phaser they debated making the bias control an internal trimpot, but made it a knob instead, so now it’s a knob that does something over like 20% of its range and is very finicky. I would have been quite happy with an internal trimpot for this.

[jorri]

Never understood them. Smaller, less adjustable knobs exist even more hardy screwdriver things. If you don't want to turn a knob or menu dive or whatever...then don't the flimsy things inside are pretty annoying and something like the Hudson Broadcast I'd really live to change the individual gains often....instead their 'special version' put the low cut in a trimpot so it was even worse, with some claiming it was a good thing to do

(Of course, delay bias, things like that is what they are actually supposed to be in a circuit for)

[jorri]

The scenario:

-fine tune parameter exists

-shall we put it in a place where its impossible to adjust while playing or maintaining the same knob positions, for which it would be really essential to do for a FINE parameter. Also, lets use the least robust component imaginable.

......

[CS]

Don't like them

I've had some pedals with them be od mojo vibe and it drove me mad. Only one I kept was the king of tone because I dare not sell. I have no idea how the switches are set.

Multi knob fuzzes are great. I only sold the graphic fuzz because it took 40 volts. Really?

[øøøøøøø]

The scenario:

-fine tune parameter exists

-shall we put it in a place where its impossible to adjust while playing or maintaining the same knob positions, for which it would be really essential to do for a FINE parameter. Also, lets use the least robust component imaginable.

......

I don't really agree, as qualified service personnel will have the right equipment and procedures to calibrate the device (it's usually not done by ear).

The biggest case against trimmers, in my view, is the fact that most people are unable to resist fucking with them.

So when you rent some device that you didn't even know had trimmers inside (or encounter it as part of a studio's collection or buy secondhand), it's very likely to be miscalibrated and need service right off the bat.

I had a very frustrating encounter with a Teese RMC wah pedal at a studio out here awhile back. The artist wanted a wah part. Studio, do you have a wah? Yes? Great!

Except that a very nice wah pedal had been rendered completely unusable by someone having a blast with the myriad DIP switches and trimmers inside.

We had no documentation, and after three people (two of whom had technical chops!) tried for an hour to get a normal wah sound out of it we were all left unsure whether it was broken, out-of-calibration, or both. So we all made the call to give up on the artist's idea without hearing it. I think of that as the gear letting us down.

I doubt the situation would've been massively improved had all of those controls been on the outside

[Jaguar018]

One reason I've never picked up a Chase Bliss pedal is because of all the external switches. I prefer simple pedals most of the time.

I did have to get into my Maxon AD-900 pedal. With a little advice from Zhivago, I was able to get the repeats to oscillate.



Counterpoint to a lot of this is that we can get just about any pedal flavor under the sun these days and many of them don't have trim pots, so it's not like we are forced into having them (unless we get into a situation like øøøøøøø did with studio gear ).