Volume/tone pots question

[Instant Dan]

My SG has the 300K volume/tone pots from Gibson. I was going to switch them out for 500K to open up the humbucker and p90 in my guitar. I keep seeing everyone mention linear and taper pots, what are the differences? Would solid-shaft work well?

[Hemisaurus]

You're kinda mixing your terms, linear and audio or logarithmic, refer to the taper of the pot, which is how it's made electrically.

For volume and tone on a guitar you want a logarithmic or audio taper pot (same thing different name).

http://sound.westhost.com/pots.htm
http://www.geofex.com/Article_Folders/potsecrets/potscret.htm

[liquidsmoke]

It never ends does it... the searching and researching and trying new gear/modding/etc. At a certain point in the very near future I'm going to just call it done and whatever tone I have is what I'll stick with for a few years whether it's exactly what I want or not. I'm so burnt on the whole business and just want to be done with it and play without a care.

My apologies.

[Hemisaurus]

Pots and rewiring can have a surprising effect on the sound. I should clarify I mean changing the wiring, not changing the wire. Putting pickups in series has a dramatic effect on the sound in a lot of cases, you can do it either by:

• Getting a Push/Pull pot with a switch on it
• Just wiring it up permanently, and leaving one set of pots unused
• Drilling holes and adding extra switches

http://www.1728.org/guitar.htm has fairly extensive wiring diagrams, NB the big pickup selector switch in a Gibson is an SPDT centre on

I have a bass whose pickups were fairly anemic to my ear, I was looking around for a new set of pickups, and just for giggle tried wiring them in series, never looked back, it sounds great.

[hayseed]

Probably a dumb question but....
what exactly do you mean by wiring in a series? In my mind i think it means that all pickups would be on all of the time rendering the selector switch useless. I am probably way off. And what does it do for for tone to wire this way?

[Hemisaurus]

Probably a dumb question but....
what exactly do you mean by wiring in a series? In my mind i think it means that all pickups would be on all of the time rendering the selector switch useless. I am probably way off. And what does it do for for tone to wire this way?

Depends on the number of pickups, and the types of pickup. If you have two single coil pickups, and wire them in series, then yep, they are both on all the time (unless you have them switchable).

If you have a humbucker, the two coils in the humbucker can be wired in series or parallel for a tonal difference.

In this case the chap has a P-90 (single coil) and a humbucker, so he can both wire the humbucker in series or parallel with itself, and the P-90 in series or parallel with the bucker.

It's much easier to read the site I posted, it's geared towards explaining this.

The tonal differences can vary, I've generally found that pickups in series have a darker, richer timbre, that I like personally.