GUITAR ELECTRICS – POTENTIONMETERS ( POTS ) – WHY DO I CARE?

Well as with any of the electrical components inside your guitar, the pots could be the final overlooked stumbling block in finding the tone of your dreams as they are in essence in control of shaping your sound.

Using the wrong value, type, or just poor quality pots could be ruining all the other upgrades you may have done so far, and the good news is they are a cheap and easy fix.

So what do they do?

That’s a long answer but pots are basically a variable resistor, which can be wired in several different ways for different jobs within the guitar and amp, there are also several different types and values so lets start with the types.

Types of Potentionmeterss

There are two types of pot used inside guitars, Audio Taper and Linear Taper both do the same job but in very different ways.













Linear Taper Pots are quite self-explanatory when you turn the knob half way you have half of the resistance. These tend to be used by most for their tone controls as you have an even, logical response across the range, although this is as always a matter of personal preference.

Audio Taper pots on the other hand where specifically designed to react in a completely different way. Our ears respond to sound on an exponential scale. A sound has to be 10 times as powerful for us to hear it as twice as loud. For a 4× increase in volume, it must be 100 times as powerful. This kind of increase gives a curve like the one above, audio taper pots have been designed with this in mind and tend to be used by most as volume controls as they give a more natural increase in volume.


Values of Potentionmeters

There are many values available but the ones most commonly used are 250k-ohm, 500k-ohm, and 1 Meg ohm. There are some general rules of thumb surrounding which pots to use with which pickups but none of these are set in stone. So feel free to experiment.

Medium impedance pickups (i.e. high output single coils & low output humbuckers) generally sound best with 250k - 330k ohm pots. With some, you may be able to justify 500k-ohm pots, but again… Depending on your pickups and taste, you might find that too brittle.

Higher impedance pickups (i.e. modern humbuckers) can scrape by with 300k ohm pots if you like the dark tone, but you’ll get much more clarity at 500k ohms. This is especially the case with modern pickups that are designed to be “hotter” versions of Gibson’s “Patent Applied For” humbuckers of the late 1950s.

Very high impedance pickups (i.e. modern metal passive humbuckers) generally behave well with 500k-ohm pots, but you might find that 1,000,000-ohm (1M ohm) pots work for you.

One other thing of note is that due to the manufacturing tolerances of plus or minus 20-30% percent a 500k pot could measure anywhere between 350K-600K this is where the buying quality parts comes in. You can buy calibrated sets, which can be expensive, but there are several modifications that can be done to bring them up to value. Go to the Les Paul Forum for more information on that one.