There used to be ‘no hardware’ and ‘no pickups’ options for the kits and you could save £10 or so (so less VAT to pay on import as well). But that seemed to have stopped. One issue was that the control rout cover plates for rear-routed kits were in the hardware packs, so you ended up having to make your own if you didn’t want the hardware. That’s about the only kit parts I normally use.
What don’t you like about the tone pots? I use 250k audio pots for tone on humbuckers and single coils as I think almost nothing occurs on a 500k pot above halfway down. And audio pots to me give a more useable range over the pot’s travel.
The tone pot resistance simply limits the amount of mids and treble that are bled away to ground through the tone capacitor. Turn the tone pot right down and you hear the full effect of the capacitor. With the resistance of the tone pot limiting the signal being bled off, the main guitar tone is a proportion of the straight signal and the signal missing the mids and treble.
I plotted this a couple of days ago to see what effect putting a parallel resistor across the tone pot would have on its taper, as I wanted to convert a 500k pot on a concentric pot arangement to a 250k pot.
You can see the log curve (taken from measuring an Alpha 500k audio pot and scaled down to 250k to act as a comparison), and a theoretical linear taper (the start and finish points won’t be on 0 and 100). The two middle curves are the modified curves from putting a resistor in parallel with either the whole track or between the wiper and the connected end of the pot. Note that on the X axis, 0=tone fully up (set on 10) and 100 = tone knob fully down (set on 1 or 0 depending if you have Fender or Gibson knobs).
As the loss of treble depends on the pot resistance at any given position, you can see that whilst a linear pot looses resistance more quickly than an audio pot to start with, by the time the knob is at 8.5, the resistances are similar and from then on, the audio pot always has less resistance than the linear pot until they are both fully turned down.
To my (it must be said frequency damaged) ears, even a 250k audio pot does nothing noticeable until it’s down to 6 or below.
To me, a linear pot pushes any noticeable tone variation right down to the end of its travel. Using a 500k pot moves that useable section to an even smaller portion of the travel.
But (and it’s quite a big but), a 250k pot will knock a bit more treble off the basic guitar tone than a 500k pot will, despite the real control coming after maybe turning down by 40%. If you don’t want this loss, but still want a tone control that’s useable, then you could consider a 250k ‘no load’ pot. This had a break in the track at the ‘10’ position, so the tone capacitor remains out of circuit, and you get a brighter sound than with any tone pot connected. Turn to 9 or below and the resistive track is there and you have a tone control as normal.
I really need to check the tone response out on my DAW, though a guitar speaker doesn’t produce much above 5-6kHz and I think I’m OK up to there. But you can use your guitar’s tone controls and see where you think any noticeable change in tone occurs, and if your own experience is similar to mine.
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