MORLEY VOLUME PLUS

First of all, pardon me for the lack of update for these couple of days. Good news: I got my new pedalboard and everything is installed together and it's ready for audio recording. Just need to find some time to record A/B comparisons of using pedal and no pedal.

Transparent volume pedal

At this opportunity I'll review a Morley Volume Plus pedal. Before I even do that, let me first say that my volume pedal hunting doesn't go so well. As we all know, most volume pedal uses potentiometer that causes signal degradation due to increased resistance of the overall signal on your signal chain. That's TONE SUCKING basically. Well, this pedal isn't sucking any of your tone(or almost not sucking tone, I can't really hear the difference!).

Instead of using a potentiometer, this pedal uses optical sensor or something like that. This is great because a pot will eventually wear out and need to be replaced besides its nature of being a tone sucking factor. Thus, using the optical sensor makes this pedal a reasonably transparent volume pedal. I'm trying to A/B with and without pedal and see how much tone sucking is going on: I can't tell haha !

Swelling action

Although the volume pedal is transparent, it isn't really good for accurate volume swelling due to the fact that the rocker's angle isn't too wide. However, there's a switch on the bottom right of the pedal that actually turns on the "minimum volume" adjustment with the knob on the bottom left to adjust the minimum volume that you want as you put the rocker to its lowest position. This will help you get a more precised swelling or even do a rhythm/lead switch by moving the rocker.

Nonetheless, the mechanic moving part of the pedal is smooth enough so you can get that friction-free movement when you use this pedal. I'm still trying to figure out how to adjust the rocker's tension so that I can have it a little bit harder.

Built quality

The casing is very good, the battery compartment is easy to access, nothing really to complain except for two things:

- The size of this pedal will eat a lot of space on your pedal board. This thing is so huge, it has the same size of three small-sized MXR pedals combined together. Yikes !!

- You can't really "stand" on the rocker. What I mean is you can't literally put your foot on top of the rocker and kind of put your body weight above this pedal. It doesn't really have that strong feeling like when you stand on top of a wah pedal.

Is it worth?

Usual price is $90.00. It's totally worth! It's on the same price range of the other volume pedals.

From 0 to 10

I give this pedal an 8.9. It needs to have smaller footprint and stronger metal enclosure. But actually that's a bit too harsh, I can still give this pedal a 9.5 to be honest for its transparency.

Cheers and God bless :)