Mixed pots

[keloooe]

Hey guys, I recently discovered that Gibson use 500K pots for the volume, and 300K pots for the tone. How would 250K tone pots sound with 500K volume pots???

Cheers,
Callum

[MikeL]

Purely from an electronics point of view, a pot offers a variable resistance between zero resistance and, in this case 250k? or 300k?. Since zero resistance would give the clearest/cleanest/sharpest tone and in the Gibson case, 300k? gives the softest tone, a 250k? would not go as soft as a standard Gibson. You could go higher than a 300 but there will be a point where only dogs can hear it.

Whatever the pot is used for, think of it simply as a dimmer switch

[Gavin1393]

The higher pot values are used to tone down a pickup with high values....hence a really HOT pickup is going to demand a 500k but pot with a value around '6' will probably do well with a 250k pot. Fenders used the 500k as their pickups needed to be toned down a bit!!

[dingobass]

It really depends on what kind of sound you are looking for.

I have seen some really out there combos, 500 tone with 1 meg ohm volume, 250 tone with 100 ohm vol..... The list goes on.

There are no hard and fast rules, most companies install whatever values simply through habit more than anything else..

Custom builders tend to experiment more until they get the sound they want....

[Gavin1393]

Also good to remember that most pots can have up to 20% tolerance, hence a 500k might in fact be somewhere between 400k and 600k!

[dingobass]

Quote from Gavin1393 on February 19, 2013, 14:38
Also good to remember that most pots can have up to 20% tolerance, hence a 500k might in fact be somewhere between 400k and 600k!

Yep, this is true of a lot of pots out there.
I have found that CTS are usually pretty close but the very best I have found so far are Bournes.

Bournes are usually within 10% of stated ohm!

[keloooe]

I never knew a 500K pot could actually be a 400 or 600K pot!!!
I will take DB's advice and ill buy 2 of each pot, and just experiment with them...