Potentiometer questions

G

Guitard

New member
Are volume pots and tone pots the same part? I have been looking at a few sites and none of them list pots as "Volume" or "Tone". I may be needing to purchase some for a guitar I'am thinking of building.

What would I need for tone pots. I'am planning on using a pair of Tony Iommi signature pickups from Gibson.

I was thinking of using 2 500K pots for the volume, or should I use a 500K for the bridge pickup and 300K for the neck, or does the location of the pickups make enough of a tonal difference to use 2 500Ks?
 
They're both the same thing, but the values of resistance used are probably completely different for the two applications.
The volume pot is just used to split the signal in two so a varying part of it goes to the amp. The value of this pot needs to be high or you'll get a vervy low siganl going to you amp.
The tone pot is used with a capacitor as a low pass filter. The value of this pot depends on where you want the cut off frequnecy to be. I can't remember how you work that out, best just to look inside another guitar and copy I would guess.
 
One verrry important thing to remember is that a volume control uses a "logarithmic" taper (sometimes called an audio taper). The reason for this is the way the ear perceives changes in volume (sound) - to hear an audible increase in output power (i.e. 3dB), you must DOUBLE the Amplitude of the signal. Therefore, the pot must decrease its resistance on a logarithmic scale. (and vice versa for decreasing power).
Tone controls are linear taper - they vary the resistance equally along the range of the pot. You want a smooth roll off of tone as the impedance increases in the resistive/capacitive circuit.
Hope that helps.
mike
 
If they are humbuckers, I'd go with 500k pots. If they are active, I'd go with 1Meg pots. I'm pretty sure I read once when I was buying pots a few years back that the capacitor on the tone pot takes care of the impedance gains.

I bought mine here->http://www.torresengineering.com/guitparmorin.html

Scroll about half way down the page. BTW, there's some pretty good info on this site.

Regards,
PAPicker
 
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