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Post subject: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2015 9:23 pm
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I have started changing out my pots on all my single coil Strats to 500k fender cts pots. The sound is amazing. Does anyone else do this? I'm also running .05 vintage caps as well.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2015 10:37 am
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Yes! Changing the value of the volume pots is an essential step to finding your tone.
The volume pot is the main load for the pickups. Changing the load on the PU affects the brightness of the guitar.
All coils have a resonant frequency band where their output sharply rises. This is called the resonant peak. On Strats. its about 3.5KHz. On Teles its about 2.5KHz.
Changing to a lower volume control resistance darkens the resonant peak. This is useful for reducing the Icepick-to-the-forehead effect. It also tames treble for distortion playing where high frequency response sounds fizzy.
Raising the value will brighten the guitar and bring out high harmonics.

The effect of these changes sound fundamentally different than changing tone caps or adjusting amp treble. It only affects high notes and harmonics.
Setting up your guitar tone is essential before you try to get your amp tone figured out.

The TBX tone control varies the pickup load in the 1st half of its rotation from 330k to 80k ohms.
The second half engages a standard tone circuit to lower treble.

The .05 tone cap will cut more into the mids than a .02. If that's your sound, dig it


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2015 11:21 am
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TimsAudio wrote:
Yes! Changing the value of the volume pots is an essential step to finding your tone.
The volume pot is the main load for the pickups. Changing the load on the PU affects the brightness of the guitar.
All coils have a resonant frequency band where their output sharply rises. This is called the resonant peak. On Strats. its about 3.5KHz. On Teles its about 2.5KHz.
Changing to a lower volume control resistance darkens the resonant peak. This is useful for reducing the Icepick-to-the-forehead effect. It also tames treble for distortion playing where high frequency response sounds fizzy.
Raising the value will brighten the guitar and bring out high harmonics.

The effect of these changes sound fundamentally different than changing tone caps or adjusting amp treble. It only affects high notes and harmonics.
Setting up your guitar tone is essential before you try to get your amp tone figured out.

The TBX tone control varies the pickup load in the 1st half of its rotation from 330k to 80k ohms.
The second half engages a standard tone circuit to lower treble.

The .05 tone cap will cut more into the mids than a .02. If that's your sound, dig it


Yes :) I noticed more edge through my overdrive and marshall. Getting into a zone much closer to Hendrix Blackmore SRV etc.
I am using all singles now playing classic rock. It has been equally favorable results with my duncan antiquity texas hot Texas special and fat 50 pickups.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2015 7:22 am
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I was also cloth wiring my Strats. Then I compared it to one with PVC wire with the same pickups. The PVC wired one had more edge and brilliance.
Using 500k pots and PVC wire you don't even need a humbucker. Just a higher output bridge pickup.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2015 7:24 am
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Doing a little research I found cloth wire adds a little capacitance. Taking away from your overall output.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 12:37 am
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Haven't tried it but seems like 500k pots would make it brighter and less like SRV.


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 4:14 am
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fenderfan wrote:
Haven't tried it but seems like 500k pots would make it brighter and less like SRV.



Depends on your amp I guess. With a Marshall the input level needs all the help it can get. Some amps have a much hotter input. Marshalls dont.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 9:58 pm
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@donnycraven

The Shawbucker American Standard has a dual 250/500K pot. Though you no longer use humbuckers on Strats I'd strongly recommend a tryout and share your impressions.


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 12:39 am
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donnycraven wrote:
fenderfan wrote:
Haven't tried it but seems like 500k pots would make it brighter and less like SRV.



Depends on your amp I guess. With a Marshall the input level needs all the help it can get. Some amps have a much hotter input. Marshalls dont.


I thought Marshalls were high gain but never had one.

Usually singlecoils go with 250K and humbuckers 500k. If setting up a coilsplit is common to go with a 250k pot based on the fact that humbuckers sound better with 250k than singlecoils do through a 500k. Drawback of coilsplit that I noticed on my Les Paul. Can't get that Gibson full humbucker sound with 250k pots but they had to compromise to avoid running through a 500k when you split the coils.


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 5:20 pm
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chromeface wrote:
@donnycraven

The Shawbucker American Standard has a dual 250/500K pot. Though you no longer use humbuckers on Strats I'd strongly recommend a tryout and share your impressions.


I am waiting for some to show up at my Guitar Center. This current American Standard purchase will hold me as I am back up to 3 Strats again, but am curious to hear these yes.




fenderfan wrote:


I thought Marshalls were high gain but never had one.

Usually singlecoils go with 250K and humbuckers 500k. If setting up a coilsplit is common to go with a 250k pot based on the fact that humbuckers sound better with 250k than singlecoils do through a 500k. Drawback of coilsplit that I noticed on my Les Paul. Can't get that Gibson full humbucker sound with 250k pots but they had to compromise to avoid running through a 500k when you split the coils.



I have only had real Marshalls made in Britan not the MG modeling digital amps. I imagine as with all modeling amps like the Line 6 and Fender Mustang etc, the input preamp is a very hot digital input with no need for outboard overdrive pedals or boosting. I have owned A modded Plexi when I was young about 17, but it was very noisy and ruined as far as I'm concerned. My first real good Marshall head was a new one I got in the 80s a JCM 800. Then the 90s came around and the new JCM 900 offered everything we had wished for effects loop and a lead boost switch. The JCM 2000 is about the same but evidently this one is good for a century instead of just a decade. A Marshall by itself is just a crunchy gain when maxed it is not like the amps of today. To make a Marshall really shine you have to use an overdrive or booster pedal in the front input and be able to turn it up. Once you do that its the best sounding rock amp in the world, everything else is just a copy of it. Its sort of like everything else is just a copy of a Strat or Les Paul. These of course are my opinions and only endorsed by basically every classic rock star that existed. Anyway you really notice little changes on the Marshall like removing cloth wire and going PVC, or opening up the pots specs. Just last night we did some Floyd and Hendrix at rehearsal and I nailed both sounds by simply playing my Strat through a Boss overdrive into my Marshall JCM 2000.

Image


I did some demos of my build but my second JCM 2000 Marshall head had not arrived yet. I was still using the Line 6 Spider Valve 100 watt Bogner Tube Head. It is gone now I sold it but kept the A & B cabinets, they are Marshall 1960 copies with Vintage 30 Celestions. Good stuff. Anyway these are snips of my Seymour Duncan Texas Hot Antiquity set, I put these pickups in my new American Standard, here you see it and my other Marshall head arrived and Logos off the Line 6 cabinets.

Image








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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2015 8:04 pm
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[quote="TimsAudio"]
All coils have a resonant frequency band where their output sharply rises. This is called the resonant peak.

I don't see how this can possibly be true. A coil is an inductance which has a 6Db/octave rolloff below its corner frequency. When used *with a capacitor* there is a resonant peak or trough depending on whether parallel or series. A Fender pickup is of the order of 3 henries, and to give a resonant peak of the order of kiloHertz it would need to be in parallel with a capacitance of at least several hundred picofarads, which is far too much to be accounted by stray capacitance, or self-capacitance in the coil.


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 10:35 am
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I didn't come up with this idea out of thin air,, I noticed this effect while testing guitar switching.
In order to see if pickups are switching properly and working right, I use an oscillator to drive a relay coil with a sine wave. Positioning the relay coil over the pickups induces a signal into just one pickup instead of strings that tickle all three. This way you can determine individual pickup performance.
Then I started doing response curves with different loads and different relays.
The different relays made no difference in the peaks that I was measuring.
Different loads would drop the peak much more than the rest of the band.
I googled around a bit on pickup resonance and came up with a table from a German book that listed the resonant peaks of various pickups. Sorry, I don't remember the title. But most strats were @ 3.5 KHz and Tele peaks were @ 2.5 KHz. Some listed were down to 600Hz.
The TBX tone control works with the resonanct peak as well. The first half of the rotation loads down the pickups from 330K to 85K to reduce treble. The the second half uses a stock .02 cap for further reduction in treble.
I don't know that much about the math to be able to figure out exactly what is going on here, but the evidence of my measurement is clear. The resonant peaks are affected by volume control loading and amp loading.
The first test subject was a ear piercing Strat with a 1Meg pot. Going to a 500K tamed it down nicely. Since then several pickers have experimented around with raising and lowering pot values to set up their guitars for the kind of tone they like.
Perhaps you can observe and measure this effect yourself and come up with some math that can explain it. I would be interested in that.


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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:10 pm
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I have started using the Fender Pure Vintage .1 wax and foil capacitor now. It sounds better with the 500k vintage taper volume and the 500k audio taper tone controls. Again I am playing overdriven classic rock like deep purple pink Floyd hendrix Zeppelin etc.

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 6:59 pm
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Does this mean you sold your LP's?

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Post subject: Re: Have any of you tried 500k pots on strats?
Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 7:37 pm
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Drew365 wrote:
Does this mean you sold your LP's?



No I have 3 of them and 3 Strats, Im a Gemini man its all about balance.

Thanks for asking :) How did you know I had Les Pauls?

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