Tone Chasin’: The Skinny on Capacitors and Potentiometers (Or Caps and Pots)—Part 1

By Jason Lollar

Finding your guitar tone involves a mix of science and voodoo. This alchemy includes the role of capacitors and potentiometers, also known as caps and pots. In this article, we focus on pots, and separate fact from fiction and explain how they are typically used to give you greater tone and volume control.

Choosing the Right Control Pot

There are some standard assumptions concerning pot and cap values and their use for different pickup designs, like single coils or humbuckers. These conventions can be useful, but you don’t need to blindly follow them.

Take the pot values first. Pots with higher resistance — like 500K compared to 250K — prevent higher frequencies from bleeding through to ground more than lower ohm pots. This means a 500K pot provides a brighter overall tone than a 250K pot. Higher ohms also give you a cleaner and punchier sound on the bass strings.