HELP NEEDED ABOUT VOL/TONE POT'S SIZE

[OLDEREK]

A while ago I thought I had bought a dozen 250 k pots, it turns out half of them are 500k, can these be fitted in place of a 250 k and will they work the same , I am fitting a set of Fender Lace Sensors (Gold), what about the capacitor size if I do use the 500k pots, any help will be great ...

[John M]

Go here:-

http://www.axesrus.com/axeElectronicsPots.htm

Lots of interesting stuff down tthe right hand side of the page.

[OLDEREK]

Thanks for that John , very helpful.........Cheers

[OLDEREK]

For anyone taking a interest in my question I found this..........
What is the difference between 250K & 500K pots? Either 250K or 500K pots can be used with any passive pickups however the pot values will affect tone slightly. The rule is: Using higher value pots (500K) will give the guitar a brighter sound and lower value pots (250K) will give the guitar a slightly warmer sound. This is because higher value pots put less of a load on the pickups which prevents treble frequencies from "bleeding" to ground through the pot and being lost. For this reason, guitars with humbuckers like Les Pauls use 500K pots to retain more highs for a slightly brighter tone and guitars with single coils like Stratocasters and Telecasters use 250K pots to add some warmth by slightly reducing the highs. You can also fine tune the sound by changing the pot values regardless of what pot value the guitar originally had.

[RayL]

Derek,

You haven't mentioned whether they are log or linear pots (quick rule of thumb, log pots for volume, linear pots for tone). If they are marked A and B instead of Log and Lin, then A is Lin and B is Log.

Ray

[Tone]

A coincidence here, Derek, because I'm going to look at a guitar next week which has 500k pots and I wasn't sure what the significance was.

So now I know what to listen for. Thanks to you and John for the info.

Cheers.

Tony

[peter roest]

If you are interested:
http://buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/
The tone of the guitar depends more on the length and de quality of the guitar cable, than the pot is 250 or 500 kohms.
The choice of the volumepotvalue is based on getting satisfying sound and also logical.
A Fender (singlecoil) has an DC resistance between 5 and 7 kohms with an 250 k volume pot.
A humbucker has the double value, so the volumepot has also the double value 500k.

Peter