Official Luthiers Forum!

The norm as I understand it is to use a 250k pot for single coil pickups and 500k pots with humbuckers. This I assume is to do with the tone that the potentiometer imparts on the sound, if this is the case is there any reason why we shouldn't mix it up a bit and use other values to create different sounds?
It's probably already done somewhere and my musings are more of a personal light bulb moment, or not done for a very good reason.
Any opinions welcomed.


Chris.


~Nil carborundum illegitemi~

Hmm, I would have never thunked a low pot value would attenuate highs more than a high pot value.
I'll have to run some experiments on this since I don't believe it.

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I'm making a gibson explorer at the moment, and the plans call for 500K pots for the 2 volume, and 250 for the single tone.

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

Well, I'll be a Monkey's uncle. It's true.
I just figured Fender and Gibson bought the cheapest pallet of pots when the guitars were first designed.
On the other hand, a $12.00 oil-filled cap sounds no better than a $0.05 ceramic disk cap.

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The 250k single coil / 500k humbucker is just a generic (and somewhat mythical) rule that has been repeated so many times it has become perceived as fact. There's no hard rule tying one pickup type to one pot value for ideal results (Fender for example, has used 1meg pots on plenty of their single coils including Teles, and Gibson has used 300k for their standard humbucker volumes for over 40 years).

If you're not in a big hurry, I'll be posting a number of videos in the coming months demonstrating effects of factors like this in a very clear and audible way, with real time switching between pots, caps, and wiring arrangements. Here's the tool I'll mostly be demonstrating with.





You can follow us on Facebook and/or youtube to get the videos as they come up.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

Hi Chris- I recommend trying different values of pots and caps so you can make your own determinations/values.
It's just effort...not like you're going to blow something up, not that expensive and nothing you can't undo.

The impact of pot resistance (and capacitor value on the treble-cut) varies greatly depending on the impedence of the pickups and the impedence of the first circuit the guitar is plugged into. Plus, both of these impedences can vary over the frequency range of hearing and so can't be described that well by one number. Two humbuckers can have wildy different reactions to the same control circuitry. The extremes are an alnico old-fashioned clean pickup and a ceramic distortion model.
When I tinker with this stuff I do it for one specific pickup combination and try to get it right for both a good clean transistor pedal and also direct into a fender tube amp.