
Originally Posted by
Simon Barden
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.