With Custom Shop 69's the 250k CTS pots sound the best. They are very bright pickups and any pots with a higher value would be too harsh.

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Custom Shop '59 Strat with John Cruz Master Design Pickups
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The higher the value the pot is the less load on the pickup the less load on the pickup the brighter the sound. This is because the treble is bleeding through to ground less because of the reduced load. Single coils can be to bright sounding so most use 250k pot to help add a warmer sound to them were as guitars like LP's use 500k most times to keep them higher in tone with the humbuckers. It all depends on the pickups and how hot they are to find what combo gives the sound you like. Also as said the cap being used also effect swhat tone frequencies are going to bleed to ground along with the pots limiting them even more. Which brings you to no load pots which when turned on removes the pots load compleatly from circut and make the pickup full treble.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

I like your style!

Very knowledgeable on ship identification, I seem to remember, too...

Cheers - C

Here is another way to think of it. The volume potentiometer is a variable resistor with a maximum value. The potentiometer acts as a barrier between the signal and ground. As you roll off the volume you lower the barrier until all of the signal is shunted to ground and you get no volume at all.

For single coil pickups the max value is usually chose as 250kohms and for humbuckers it is 500kohms. The reason lies in the nature of the frequency response of the two types of pickups.

Single coil pickups have a frequency response that has a high peak in the 5-7 khz range. In other words, the sound of a single coil pickup is dominated by high frequency harmonics. A 250 kohm resistor allows some of those high frequencies to bleed off even in the full volume position making the sound less "ice picky."

Humbuckers usually have a much flatter frequency response curve. That is, they sound "fat." You don't want to lose any of the high harmonics, so the use of a higher resistance potentiometer is appropriate. It saves the highs.

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James Burton Upgrade Telecaster
Hot Rodded Am Fat Strat Texas Special (now featuring Kinman Traditional II pickups)
Fender Blues Jr.
SWR California Blonde
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[quote="giljanus"]This guy seems to know what he talks about, I've read his writing for awhile, and I've listened to his music - he's not a bad guitarist either.

That's a very impressive link for an individual who has the working knowledge of the physics of electrical circuits, and can read schematics.
I'm assuming the OP does, but there was something in his questioning which made me wonder.

Doc.

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"Another day in paradise!"

Thanks for your concern Doc:)

I did a basic electronics course in school way back when, so with the help of that and Wikipedia I got the gist of it