AG-1 perhaps i am Tony Iommi?

[Simon Barden]

thats very interesting Simon.
So if i put in 600 or 700 or 1Meg pots in as volume pots i would get a brighter?/louder?/better? sound?
just thinking out loud cos i will definitely use the ones that i have bought (500K push/pull).

The higher the pot value, the higher the pickup's resonant peak moves up and the brighter the sound, but there's no real point putting more than a 1Meg pot in as you get into smaller and smaller exponentially decreasing increments. With more resistance between the signal and ground, you get a tiny bit more output (some people fit a 'blower' switch which bypasses the volume and tone pot for maximum pickup output), but it's not a huge amount. You won't get any brighter than the pickup with no volume pot attached.

1 Meg pots are really for overwound, high output pickups to try and add as much treble back as you can. If you've got a pretty standard PAF-level humbucker, then 520k-550k is about right. You can make a pickup sound a bit too bright for its own good. And intermediate value pots between 500k and 1 Meg are hard to find and not guitar-orientated, so you may find PCB mounting ones, but not a standard guitar sized one. You can fit a parallel resistor on a 1 Meg pot to get an overall lower resistance, but it also modifies the shape of the taper.