Humbucker Pots....

[sixstringdrug]

I have a homemade frankentele loaded with seymour duncan pickups. They are the 4 lead style. I went to my local guitar shop to get the pots (1 volume, 1 tone) and they suck. On both of them it is either all the way on or all the way off, no middle ground. My question is, what type of pots should I get to fix this problem. Also, anyone wanna weigh in on the pros/cons of splitting the coils. I am not a big single coil guy. So even if I never split the coils, will using a push/pull pot suck any tone from my pickups? I love the sound of the SD's ! Thanks for your input, sound off fretters!

Also, existing pots are 500k (not sure if they are audio or linear taper) with a .22 sprague orange drop cap.

 

[Bookkeeper's Son]

That's a common complaint, and from my limited experience, it's the nature of the beast. I replaced my stock cheapo Epiphone pots because one was getting scratchy. The new CTS 500k audio taper (most common humbucker replacement for tone and volume) pots are only slightly better, middle ground-wise. And the audio taper volume vs the linear taper it replaced doesn't make any dramatic difference, either.

 

[Eric]

Sounds to me like it's an audio taper vs. linear taper issue. If both of them are doing it, you might have linear on the volume and audio on the tone, which would be backwards from the typical setup. From what I know of it, push-pull shouldn't have any tone suck (so to speak) and pot value (i.e. 500k) shouldn't affect the sound over the travel of the pot.

Basically, the only reason to change the pot value is if you want a slightly brighter or darker sound. A higher value pot will just let less of your signal 'sneak by' the pot, so to speak. Since the first frequencies to go when you drop the volume are the high ones, as you lose signal that way it tends to be the higher frequencies. So on a 1 meg pot, you will lose less signal when the volume is on 10 vs. a 250k pot, so it will sound brighter as a result.

500k is pretty standard for a humbucker. I'm not sure why the different values for different pickup types, but I think it probably has something to do with humbuckers being inherently darker due to some of the waves canceling each other out due to the two coils being right next to each other, so you want to preserve more of the high end. But that's really just a guess.

Anyway, good luck to you. I've had good luck with Alpha pots, so you could give those a shot if you want to try something else.

 

[deeaa]

I dunno what pots are available there, but the thing I always do at some point is bypass the tone pot & cap. Can't recall ever using the the tone control on the guitar really. There's a few times I would have wanted extra bright but no pot does that, and for the moments I want clearly darker tones, I use a wah. I think no cap & tone = clearly more immediate and punchy sound.

Can't say I have noticed a push-pull control to have any effect on sound, I think the cap may be the main culprit in affecting the sound actually.

As for split coils - I always do that. All my guitars are either single bucker at the bridge, or that plus a single coil at the neck. I have never used or liked a neck bucker; to me they just sound way too round and muffled with this annoying wailing guitar hero sound at best - they just don't rock. But many of my guitars have buckers at neck, in which cases I have rigged them so that they are by default in single-coil mode and switchable to bucker if need be some day.

Quite often I like to play cleaner parts with neck single and bridge bucker on at the same time; that gives a big and nice sound. Just the neck single is usually too bright or jangly for me.

Since your SD likely allows for it, what I'd do is make it by default twin-coil singles, i.e. wire it so that it has two single-coils on at the same time, I mean like you'd have strat 2nd position.
That's what I had on my Les Paul, and I really liked it, it was perfect for cleans on a Paul, not too thin. But my current pickups don't allow for that wiring scheme.