tone pot affecting the volume?

Funky P

Funky P

New member
I took one of my old beater guitars and see if i could do any electrical mods for the sake of learning something. Well i played it and of course it was a muddy mess. I then disconnected the tone pot to get some clearity, to my surprise it worked, very well too. I switched to the neck pickup, lowered the volume, and played through my amp with mildly high amounts of gain. With the tone pot now out the sound was clear, chimey, and clean.

Now i dont feel like ripping out the tone pot on my main guitar, so what should i do to get similar results?
 
Re: tone pot affecting the volume?

larry- I just did that to two pots and it was even easier than it looked in that article. There were 4 prongs holding the cover of the pot and I bent them back to remove the cover. With a sharp pointed tool I scraped a line across the resistive path (carbon?) right where it connected to the CW terminal. I confirmed things with a DMM, snapped the cover back on and reinstalled it. It worked perfectly!

If you use the nail polish, I would give it several days to cure, just so it doesn't get on the metal piece that rotates.

Thanks!
 
Re: tone pot affecting the volume?

Just did the no load pot, kinda wish i hadn't now, the result isnt the same.

I'm thinking its the layout of the wiring. The pups go to volume > switch > tone > jack. On the other it goes switch > volume > jack. could the location of the tone pot be the problem? Gibson wiring doesnt loose high end when the volume is lowered.
 
Re: tone pot affecting the volume?

Funky P said:
Just did the no load pot, kinda wish i hadn't now, the result isnt the same.

I'm thinking its the layout of the wiring. The pups go to volume > switch > tone > jack. On the other it goes switch > volume > jack. could the location of the tone pot be the problem? Gibson wiring doesnt loose high end when the volume is lowered.
Click to expand...

If it is shielded cable going to the tone pot you might want to make sure that the center conductor isn't shorting out to ground a little. You might also want to ohm out the pot; it should be 250k to 500k, anything lower than that can load down your signal a lot. With two humbuckers and a single tone control, 250k would not be unreasonable (normally you want to use 500k pots with humbuckers). Last but not least the tone cap itself might be too large; I usually use 0.022uF tone caps, unless I'm looking for the EC "Woman" tone which would use a 0.015uF/630v poly cap. Of course when the no-load pot is set to "10", the cap and the resistance of the pot should be removed from the circuit completely so it would have to be a problem with the design or the wire.

Good luck!
 
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