Tone control not responding that well. Long read SORRY

[big kurka]

So the back story, I have this guitar that had undesirable pickups in it so I changed them and in the process I rewired the guitar and upgraded the pots to cts and the caps which I have done a few dozen times on my guitars and friends guitars. The problem that I having on this particular guitar is the tone control doesn't have much effect until it gets just below 3 then all of sudden the highs roll off. Initially I thought it was because of the .022 cap. So I change the cap to a .047 but the effect response was the same, no real change until 3. So that made get the ohm meter out and start measuring things. I found that the pot I used had a vintage 30% taper on it. So I grabbed another pot measured found it to be a 10% taper and installed. Same response. No real effect until 3 on the knob. started measuring things again and discovered that the pot a grabbed was a reverse taper. So grabbed another pot made sure it was a 10% taper and the correct rotation. installed it and it did improve the response a little but still there no real big change in the tone until 4 now. All my other guitars tone control respond fairly quickly around 7-8 and there a significate change in tone. I went scouring on the web to see if anyone else has had this problem. I found a thread over on the les paul forum and the guy had the same problem/ concern. he wound up using a 250K pot for both his tone controls with perfect results according to him.

Anyone have this problem?
If so did you fix it and if you did how???

My concern about using a 250K tone pot is it will slightly darken the tone of the pickup and I don't want that. Then I started thinking what if you use a 1meg pot for the volume and a 250K even a 100K to try and not darken the pickup as much. What are your thoughts on this.

[freefrog]

What you describe is understandable and even normal.

With passive pickups, a tone pot does two things:

-firstly, it flattens the resonant peak of pickup(s) while resistance decreases.

-then, once its resistance is low enough, it introduces a "new" resonant peak due to the tone capacitor in parallel with the pickup(s). In many cases, it happens under 3.5/10...


The fact that a tone control changes the sound or not when the pot is @ 7 or 8 is not only a question of taper: it's also inherent to the resonant frequency and Q factor of the pickup(s) involved, among other parameters.


If you want to use a 250k or even a 100k tone control without darkening the sound when the pot is full up, just buy a no-load control or change a regular pot in no-load one. It's easy to do:

https://sixstringsupplies.co.uk/pages/how-to-make-no-load-tone-pot

HTH.

[big kurka]

The pickups in this guitar are the distortion set. I just thought is was very weird.

freefrog Question regarding the no load pot, with the tone pot on 10 and and there's no load won't that affect the volume control response? Just a curious thought. Thanks.

[beaubrummels]

I believe the only time I've had a similar problem is when the tone wiring wasn't fully grounded. But it's been a while since I've had something like that happen.

[Spaghetti Bolo]

Changing the Volume to 1 Meg won't affect the volume control response?

You can easily disconnect your current tone pot to see how your current Volume control will function when paired with a no load.


I nearly always use 250k Audio no loads because I prefer the response. However, I have no problem with the stock 500k tone pots I still have on a couple of Humbucker axes. I just roll them down until I get what I want. They have knurled Tele style knobs so they can't be 'read' anyway.

[beaubrummels]

Is this using 50's wiring, or 'modern' wiring? Or some other scheme like independent volumes? What is the actual configuration?

[freefrog]

The pickups in this guitar are the distortion set. I just thought is was very weird.

freefrog Question regarding the no load pot, with the tone pot on 10 and and there's no load won't that affect the volume control response? Just a curious thought. Thanks.

As said by Spaghetti Bolo, you can disconnect temporarily your tone pot(s) in order to hear how the volume control(s) would behave with a no-load tone...

And as implied by Beau', the response will differ if the guitar has modern wiring or 50s wiring.

If ever you want the same resistive load in any case (and therefore an identical sound with both pots full up), consider that a 500k volume + a 500k tone = a 250k volume + a no-load control when pots are full up.

Below is a 5Spice sim taking in account the kind of specs of Duncan Distorsion pickups and emulating their response through 3m of guitar cable plugged to a 1M input. Upper left = more or less typical taper of a tone pot. Upper right = taper of volume from 10/10 to 1/10 with 250k volume and no-load tone (full up). Bottom left = volume pot taper from 10/10 to 1/10 if both pots are 500k (and tone control set full up), 50s wiring. Bottom right = the same with modern wiring...

FWIW. Once again, HTH. :-)

[big kurka]

The wiring is basically modern wiring. The only difference is I have the center lug grounded on the tone pot and the cap on the outer lug going to the outer lug of the vol pot. I’ve been told it’s a 60’s modern wiring. I think I’m going to go with a 250k pot and modify it for no load when on ten

[GuitarDoc]

The wiring is basically modern wiring. The only difference is I have the center lug grounded on the tone pot and the cap on the outer lug going to the outer lug of the vol pot. I’ve been told it’s a 60’s modern wiring.

That would be "Modern tone" IF the lead from the pup ALSO goes to that outside lug. It's not just the specific lug on the vol pot that makes it "modern" tone wiring, it's whether that lug on the vol pot ALSO has the lead from the pup. For example: if the input from the pup goes to the middle lug on the vol pot ("Independent volumes") and the lead to the tone pot comes off of the outer lug of the vol pot you will have "Vintage/50s tone". If the lead from the pup goes to the outer lug on the vol pot and from there goes to the tone pot (BOTH pup and tone pot connected to outer lug of vol pot), then you'd have "Dependent volumes with Modern tone".