Pot Tolerances vs. Installation "Locations"

[bobvines]

I recently repaired a friend's bass by replacing the original (~30-year-old) "scratchy" volume & tone pots. And, of course, all pots have tolerances. (I just guessed where to place each pot on the bass and my friend was very happy to have a guitar good enough to play during paying gigs.) I don't know how to determine which pot, based on its actual value, to put where. Is there a "rule-of-thumb" for placing pots of differing values due to their tolerances when you don't have a "matched" set of pots? Which pot "value" should be used for the neck pickup or the bridge pickup (for guitars with two pickups) and which should be used for tone control, i.e., the highest resistance value to the lowest value vs. location?

I guess I'm trying to ask whether the "neck" volume pot ought to get the highest or lowest value pot vs. which one the "bridge" volume pot get vs. which one(s) the tone pot(s) ought to get? I hope this question makes sense....

If this has already been answered here, please give me a link to that discussion.


Thanks,

Bob

[Leo_Gnardo]

Typically you get a set of pots, all nominally rated 250K or 500K ohms. No worry about which one to put where, based on minor differences in actual resistance. Bottom line: it don't much matter.

But it IS good to measure them, in case you got one that's mis marked or way out of tolerance. And pot tolerance is often rated at plus or minus 20%. Don't expect much precision, even in expensive ones that sell northwards of $40 each.

[Steve A.]

Single coil strat-style pickups usually have 250k volume pots which cut the highs a little bit. Humbuckers usually use 500k volume pots to brighten the sound. However if a strat pickup is a bit muddy you might want to use a 500k pot and if a humbucker is too bright you might want to use a 250k pot to smooth it out a bit.

Everybody says to use audio taper pots for volume controls but it's okay to use linear pots for tone controls (many guitars have audio pots for both volume and tone controls.)

If we knew the brand and model we could probably give you more specific advice.

Steve Ahola

[bobvines]

The guitar is a 1986 Peavey Foundation bass guitar. I did use 250K audio taper for all three of the pots, based on information from Peavey. And, if memory serves, I used an audio taper for the tone control too, not knowing any better.

My friend is very happy with her original bass being playable again though and thinks that its tone is as good as or better than what she fell in love with in '86, so I guess it really doesn't matter what the "exact" resistance values are for each pot location. Right now, since she's happy with its tone, I have to assume that Peavey originally used an audio taper pot for the tone control in its Foundation bass guitars back then.