I'm going to rebuild a strat of mine, and I have a question about pots. wouldn't it make sense to use 1-meg pots for everything and a low value cap? I mean, if you don't want that bright sound, can't you just turn down the tone?
Also, can I add a resistor to a push/pull pot so that it increases the resistance of the pot only when in a certain position? I want to use a push/pull pot for a master tone and to control the distorion of a black ice overdrive...thing. The black ice works best with low resistance, but I want to maintain the bright sound you get from using high resistance pots. Up: low R, distorion control. Down: High R, tone control. <--possible?
Thanks
As far as using 1M pots everywhere, sure you can do it. My tele ('69 thinline reissue) actually came with 1M pots for vol and tone, but I didn't really like it that way, and switched it to more normal 250k pots. You are kind of right about being able to turn the volume or tone down, but I really didn't like the taper of it. ie if I turned it a little down, it changed a whole lot. Maybe I should have tried to muck with the taper of it... I dunno...
As for adding a resistor to a push pull pot. Yes, you can do that to basically change the low end of the pot's resistance. I'd do something like:
|
V
_____///______///____
| |
SPST V GND
|
V GND
The SPST is the switch in the push/pull pot. When the switch is closed, the extra resistor is essentially not in circuit. When the switch is open, the low end of the pot will be the value of the extra resistor. What I don't know is if that would work with whatever the black ice thing is. I've heard of it before, but I have no idea how they're wired...
You may also want to look into no-load pots. They are pots when you turn them up to the max value they click out and break the circuit completely open. I've seen these used for tone pots before to get an extra little oomph to the treble. It sounds like you _really_ like treble, so you may want to look into that. My instructor's Yngie Malmsteen signature strat has that on the tone control.
TZ
Thanks, though I think I'll just stick with a 500k push/pull instead of messing with any extra resistors. I guess they too with dramatically effect the taper. Black ice is just two diodes that replace a tone cap, and if I can't find any schottky diodes locally (don't want to pay $30 for the actual black ice) I'm just going to go with a TBX tone control instead. It sounds neat :).
