I have been trying to find a way to get a great crunchy distortion out of my guitar when the volume is low. I think I found the answer when I was browsing the band equipment section on the weezer website. Talking about River's strat, it reads:
"Additionally, there was a special capacitor added to the wiring that kept the tone thick and crunchy, even when the volume was turned down low (hence the nice "quiet-yet-crunchy" live concert tone on the quiet parts of "say it aint so", etc...) This may have been a "Black Ice" module, which replaces the capacitor on the tone knob and is a passive overdrive/distortion circuit, controllable by the tone knob once you put it in place of the tone capacitor. However, as only the volume knob was left functioning, I believe it was instead hooked into the volume knob, thus increasing its activity as the volume was turned up (or down?)"
I am wondering if anybody has experience with the Black Ice unit on the volume pot? How can I wire it so when the volume is turned down, overdrive goes up? Will the volume pot still control volume, or does it just turn into an overdrive control? The stewmac page only has info about connecting it to a tone pot. Does this mean I can keep the capacitors on the tone pots to keep the treble bleed? Sorry for all the questions, I am not the best at electronics, but I really want this effect! Thanks for any help!