ShortScale.org

Hey Is the quality of wire you use and the quality of pots you use important? I mean as far as affecting tone? I'm looking at replacing all my squire strat wiring and pots with some gibson pots or fender pots and all new wiring. It has 500k pots in it already, just wondereing if this will improve tonal range or not when using the volume and tone knobs.

Matt

it will let the current travel a lil bit easier, but its more important to have good connections than size pots and stuff.
an uprgrade is an upgrade.

I think it will help a bit if you replace the pots and wiring. Usually strats are wired with 250K pots, so moving up to 500K or even 1Meg will probably increase your treble response. Some people think that too high of a value will make single coil pickups sound harsh, but I honestly don't think so -- there's this useful thing called a tone knob or a treble control on your amp, haha. Just back those off a little bit if you feel it's getting too bright.

I have noticed that a quality pot will make a difference as far a reliability goes. Junky pots will cut in and out or have more static before, say a switch craft would. To me pots are not that expensive, even for quality ones, so given the choice of 2 bucks for a shitty one or 5 bucks for quality it's not that hard of a decision.
As far as wire goes, if it's shielded it will help cut down on some of the humm and buzzzzzzzzz. Again wire isn't expensive, so if yer gonna do some rewiring you may as well put in shielded. If it already has shielded wire it is most likely ok.

That's my .02$

buying branded fender or gibson pots is probably a waste of money. it won't affect the tone, but as rodvonbon said, better quality pots won't crap out on you as easily. alpha pots are pretty reliable and are pretty cheap too.

of course, if the pots in the guitar are working fine, it's really not worth changing.

BTW.... if you use shielded wiring, make sure you connect each wire's shield to ground at one end only, to avoid adding hummmm.

Useful wiring/grounding informations. I think so, anyway.

Cool thanks fellas.

i replaced all the squier pots and switchs in my tele, new wire everything.
I had to sand out the bottom of the cavity for the new pots and round switch as apposed to the stock squier pcb switch. probaby 1 or 2mm's. and i also had to make the holes in the control plate bigger. widen the diameter for the pot shafts quite a bit



not saying that its going to be the same in yours....all squier's are different but be prepared with a dremmul with a sanding drum and a bit of time to do the job correct

As far as brand goes, quality isn't really about tone. If you go from a 100k to a 250k, yea, I would imagine a tone difference. But, if you go from a Fender 250k to a Gibson 250k to a Alpha 250k, I doubt you'll hear much. Who knows, tho, try it out and tell us whatchu think!

while we are the topic of pots, does anyone know where to score a varitone switch?
and what the most "modes" you can get on one is?

http://www.google.com/search?client=saf ... 8&oe=UTF-8

Sadly, I've never heard of varitone, looks crazy, tho...