Pot Values & Tone

[mrblue]

Hello,

I have a Jackson Rhoads Concorde CD24 with a set of Duncan Black Winter pickups.

Over all, I like the sound of the guitar/pickups. However, they seem to be just a bit too "ice picky." I have CTS 500K pots installed for both the volume and tone. I am thinking about replacing them with 250K pots. So here's my question, can I replace only the tone pot or do I need to replace both pots to get the desired reduction in highs?

Thanks!

[EndTime]

Either. Or both. No right or wrong answer. Altho if you change the Volume to 250, that usually has a bit more of an affect at slightly darkening the tone a bit. As it’ll lower the resonant frequency a touch. Many Gibson’s shipped with 300k volume and 500 tone. And Many felt the change was pretty noticeable when they switched to 500k if they wanted to brighten their guitar. Cause just dropping the tone isn’t accomplishing much different than simply lowering the tone control of a 500k pot.

So I would experiment with a 250k or 300k volume pot first. I do it all the time especially in guitars where all I have is a volume.

[Zozobra]

If you run with the volume up full all the time you can just tack a resistor across the outter lugs of the pot to test out different values. Taking a 470k resistor across a 500k pot is equivalent to 250k. 820k is close to 300k. This will interact with the pot taper though. This is commonly done on the gain/master pots in amps to change the corner frequency and taper, although here lower values increase brightness at the expese of output.

Good info on using a resitor to try things towards the bottom here:
https://northwestguitars.co.uk/blogs/bl ... tar-wiring