We hope this has been helpful in any k vs k pots dilemmas you might have been having.Log in or Sign up. This type of pot will cause the volume to seem to change the most right when it is almost all the way up. An audio taper travels from zero to max in a logarithmic way, similar to the way the human ear works. Halfway through, a k pot should have a resistance of around k.
Experimentation will lead to the best results What is the Taper? Hot Broadcaster Pickups: 250k Pots or 500/550k Pots?Ī linear taper goes from zero to max in a linear fashion. Pots, 250k, 500k ?įig 2 You can customize your own tone and make it brighter or warmer by trying different pot values. What is a potentiometer? How does it work? So why do we use different values? Fig 1 The two coils in a humbucker pickup cancel out many high frequencies because of phase cancellation caused by the closeness of the two coils. Match the following descriptions to the related factors that can Skip to content The k vs k pots dilemma is one that often poses a challenge for guitar players. Your email address will not be published. Guitars primarily use the linear taper pot, but there are some guitar players like to use the audio taper for their Tone Control pots. The taper is the way in which the value goes from zero to max. Each value of pot comes in two different types of taper: a Linear Taper or an Audio Taper. The last thing that you need to know about pots concerns the taper. There are many values available besides the standards and changing the value of either the Volume or the Tone will alter the overall sound of your guitar. You can customize your own tone and make it brighter or warmer by trying different pot values. This makes a humbucker sound very warm, compared to a single coil, and these are often paired with a k pot Fig 2 that will preserve more of the high end that remains. The two coils in a humbucker pickup cancel out many high frequencies because of phase cancellation caused by the closeness of the two coils. Single coil pickups can sometimes sound very bright and piercing, so these pickups are often paired with k pots Fig 1 to allow more high frequencies to escape. The lower the value of the potentiometer, the more high-end frequencies will be allowed to escape to ground. The higher the value of your potentiometer, the greater the amount of high-end frequencies will be kept in your signal and passed to your amplifier. We use different values because high-end frequencies can get past our resistance wall, and we must decide how much of those high frequencies we want to keep. When you turn the Volume Control on your guitar all the way up, you are placing a K or a k wall between your signal and the ground, forcing most of it to go to your amplifier.
This, essentially, turns your guitar off, or all the way down. When your potentiometer is turned all the way down, there is no resistance to prevent all the guitar signal from going to ground, instead of to your amplifier. When a potentiometer is placed between the pickup and the amplifier, it provides another path for the signal to take, a way straight to ground, bypassing the amp. With no Volume Control, your guitar signal goes directly from your pickup to your amplifier. A potentiometer is a variable resistor that allows you to manually adjust the amount of resistance between zero and the value of a particular potentiometer. Many times the value is stamped right on the bottom of the potentiometer, but this is not a rule. If it gets too worn out, the static sound will remain, even when the control is not being operated, and it will be time to replace it. This scratching sound is caused by the dust and dirt that accumulates in the casing of the potentiometer, and just from regular wear and tear. Tone Chasin’: The Skinny on Capacitors and Potentiometers (Or Caps and Pots) - Part 1 One of the most common problems that guitar players face is a worn out Volume or Tone control.