Volume pots

gtrjunior

gtrjunior

Wannabe
I recently had the PCB board in my 2012 LP removed and wired up traditionally (50’s style). I bought 2 500K volume pots from RSGuitarworks. It’s their “superpot”.
I’m not liking the taper on these things. It’s very smooth, but there isn’t a whole lot of noticeable difference in the tone. The old pots from the PCB board had a noticeable gain decrease when just nudging the volume down to about 8 or maybe 7.
In a high gain setting this worked ideally for me especially in a song where there might be moments of silence. I could nudge the volume down a hair and it would be just enough to keep it from feeding back but still had plenty of grit.

Is there a way to change the taper of the pots I have or do I need to get linear pots?

Also, I’d like to slightly darken the high end.....300K linear taper pots?
 
gtrjunior said:
traditionally (50’s style)
Click to expand...

Well, traditional/modern and '50's style are two different ways of wiring up an LP. "Modern" may be a misnomer, it's the way Gibson's have wired the pots for 50+ years. LP's have used "Modern" wiring since they went back into production in '68.

You can read about it all here, but the important part for you is...
The modern version will maintain the overall volume better when you roll down the volume but at the cost of losing a bit of high end. If you have a bright pickup that may not seem that bad of an idea, because with less volume and the same amount of treble the tone might be too piercing. On the other hand, the 50s version keeps the amount of treble the same but drops a bit in volume as soon as you roll down the tone pot.
Click to expand...

The "Modern" Gibson wiring will have more treble loss when you roll back the Volume and the '50's style wiring will have volume loss and more treble when you roll back the Tone. Overall, most people are more used to the way the Modern wiring responses to changes.

A lot of people prefer linear pots for Tone controls so they have more change early in the sweep., and there is no harm in going to 300K for Tone.
 
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"Is there a way to change the taper of the pots" Only if you want to take it apart somehow and replace the guts of the pot. Most would just get different pots.

Higher value caps will darken your sound too. Go from .047 to .068.
 
Here’s a couple of shots of the control cavity.

efc46adc046e10b02628c4c75a01b83c.jpg
f75e6cace0b86f0e32d9a9618cb311e0.jpg


I’m pretty green when it come to a lot of this stuff so I’m not 100% sure what’s going on here.
It looks like there is a small blue resistor on the volume pots....treble bleed?
 
gtrjunior said:
Here’s a couple of shots of the control cavity.

efc46adc046e10b02628c4c75a01b83c.jpg
f75e6cace0b86f0e32d9a9618cb311e0.jpg


I’m pretty green when it come to a lot of this stuff so I’m not 100% sure what’s going on here.
It looks like there is a small blue resistor on the volume pots....treble bleed?
Click to expand...

Not treble bleed, but more like an overall "smoothness" capacitor.
 
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