Volume Pot question

[axedoctor]

has anyone experimented with adding a resistor between the bottom lug of a volume pot and ground to avoid the dreaded "cut-off zone" feature of Les Paul wiring in the middle pickup selector position???

[sumgai]

'doc,


This works, but when I did this for clients back in the day, they found that it tends to brighten the tone a bit. After all, you're increasing Gibon's values of 250K or 300K towards the 500KΩ pots that are often recommended for Humbucker guitars. Errr, recommended by others, not by Gibson.

This may or may not be acceptable to you (or to other readers of this thread), but for knocking off that "kill everything" effect, you'll probably want something around a quarter of the pot's value. But that's not a magic number, it's just a good starting point. What I've done in the past was to solder in a small trim pot, and let the client play with it in order to find the value that makes him/her happy. Lacking such a component, feel free to use resistors in combination (series, parallel or both) to achieve what works best for you. Then you can replace the jury-rig with a final resistance value that does the job with less clutter in the cavity.

HTH




sumgai