Tone pot wiring tricks?

['59]

I've found some tricks that are often used to cure the dull tone of a tone control as it gets turned down. I was just wondering if any of you have tried them and what your experiences were.

The first one is the greasebucket mod. Simply put, all you do is add a small bass cut to the tone control so you lose a small bit of bass as the tone is turned down. The point of this is so that the bass doesn't become overbearing as the tone is rolled off, so the tone becomes dark, but not boomy. I hear some people don't like it, but they don't explain why. This might be a fun one to play around with the electrical values for the cap.

The other one involves a small resistor, around 3k, in series with the cap to ground. This essentially stops the potentiometer from ever being fully closed, so that the weird resonant peak that forms when a pot is fully closed does not form.

Have any of you guys tried this and what was your opinion on them?

 

[Chistopher]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

I've never used either of those wiring schemes, but I will mention that the greasebucket wiring incorporates the second mod you listed, except they use a 4k7 resistor instead of 3k.

 

[PFDarkside]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

I think it’s far more important to play with the value of the cap and value/taper of the pot. Assuming you’ve got those dialed in, then mods are an interesting next step.

Something similar to your second mod, if you only use the first half of the tone control, you can cut the value of the tone pot in half (500k to 250k) then add a ~250k resistor in series to ground after the pot. This will make the whole range of the pot function like the first half used to, so you can be more precise.

 

[GuitarDoc]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

I haven't tried either of those mods because I've never been bothered by the "problems" they are designed to cure.

As far as your second one is concerned, I would agree with PFD on that one.

 

[Mincer]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

I just use very easy-turning pots (currently YJM Speed Pots) as I use the tone control as sort of a wah sometimes.

 

[AlexR]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

The mods look interesting.

Personally the 'mud tone' you get when you turn down is never something I would look for anyhow, so maybe the de-bassing of it could be useful.

 

[Artie]

Re: Tone pot wiring tricks?

There's always my "Sparkle Tone" mod. The antithesis to my de-mud mod. When the neck pup is selected, you "borrow" a bit of a high-end from the bridge. The downside is, you really need to tweak the cap and resistor values to match whatever pups you're using. Not difficult, but takes a bit more fiddlin'.