Your Guitar’s circuit uses Potentiometers to shape your guitar’s sound but did you know a potentiometer also, by its nature, loses treble?

You can drastically change the way your guitar sounds overall by tweaking this component’s value – even if the controls are turned up to 10! It’s the same rules for Volume or Tone Pots

High Resistance: Brighter

Low Resistance: Darker

Suggested Pot Values:

• Single coil guitars: 250kΩ

due to the jangly nature of singlecoils a lower resistance will remove some of the brightness in a nice way

• Humbucking guitars: 500kΩ

Due to the muddier nature of double coil humbuckers a 500KΩ pot will not bleed too much more treble off

• Jaguars: 1MegΩ

Deliberately bright! Bright single coils paired with a high resistance means all that treble will fire right at you!

• The three legs are the start and end of the carbon resistance track, the middle is the wiper which makes contact at different points as you turn the shaft
• A potentiometer will always bleed (attenuate) a small amount of the audio signal to ground through the internal workings of the pot. This attenuation is a loss in high frequencies
• The pot’s resistance measure in ohms Ω
• A potentiometer (or pot) is also known as a variable resistor

Tapers

This is the other value associated with pots sometimes called “curve”. It can be responsible for how the signal reacts as your twist the pot – is it smooth or does it jump in volume?

Logarithmic / A Curve / Audio Taper

Created for audio applications and used in all of our passive volume and tone circuits. Our ears perceive an even smooth control as the control is turned

Linear Taper / B Curve

Offers an even electrical resistance as the pot is turned – this is different to how it is perceived audibly!

Anti Log / C Curve

Used in left handed guitar wiring and other circuits, offers a smooth curve as you turn the pot audibly – but backwards!