I've been mostly talking about versatility and adding options to your instrument (here and here), but what about making what you already have more usable. That volume pot that takes away the highs when you turned it down, or that rarely used tone pot, that either cuts too much highs or not enough. Thankfully this can all be altered to get you much closer to what you want.
First thing to keep in mind as for as pots go, values are the most important part of the equation, and the higher the pots value the more highs you have.
That's why 500k are usually the recommended value for humbuckers and 250k for single coils, but in all honesty there are no rules. If your humbuckers sound dull and lifeless, try a 1000k pot, much cheaper than buying new pickups and may solve the problem.
Potentiometers can be wired in a lot of ways, the most common ones are volume and tone pots. The volume pot shorts the pickups output to ground, reducing it's volume untill you can't hear it anymore. The tone pot is a high pass filter, and with the help of a capacitor, sends the high frequencies to ground, making the sound darker and deeper.
While some people love them and use them a lot I get a lot of requests about changing them, mostly the way they behave. So here are some mods and what they do:
Treble Bleed - There are many ways of doing this, and I find there isn't one that works for every guitar and everyone. You may have noticed that when you turn the volume on the guitar down, for example half way, to clean up the sound, your tone gets muffled, the highs go away, like if you messed with the tone pot. A treble bleed solves this problem, by bringing back some of those lost high frequencies. Depending on what you want, this mod can also be made to add highs as you turn the pot down, this is particularly useful you use the volume to go from overdriven tones to clean ones.
Improving The Sweep - In some cases your pots sweep can be very inconsistent. Nothing happens until you reach the end of the pots travel and you get no in between positions: from 10 to 3 nothing changes and then suddenly you are left with no highs (tone) or no sound (volume). This mod is made to correct that problem. It gives a large range with a usable sweep, I find especially useful in the tone pot.
Cap Change - Capacitors or caps for the tone pot come in a huge variety of sizes, materials, and values. Just like the pots let's focus on the value: the higher the value the more highs disappear when the pot hits 0. Usually your guitar will come either with a 0.047 (single coil) and 0.022 (humbucker).
Find your tone pot unusable (especially on 0), change your cap. There a lot of values you can try, and they don't just affect the end of the pots sweep, but all of it. A smaller cap will give you a less extreme end, but more in between positions.
To help me and the clients make the choice and find the best cap for the guitar I built a tone cap tester (inside the box of an old fuzz pedal). It has a pot and a 6 position switch with selected caps and a bypass switch (to compare with the original sound).
Note: Both caps and pots have a tolerance, so it's not unusual for a 250k pot to actually measure 300k or 200k, this will change the way they sound and act. Keep that in mind when changing pots and caps, and measure them to make sure.
Jay
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