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Resistance is futile, except sometimes it’s not.

Theres that age old rule that 500k pots are better suited to humbuckers as they let a bit more treble through and 250k are better on single coils as they kill off a bit of the shrillness. So what do you do on guitars that have a mix of both humbuckers and single coils ?

You can get the best of both worlds by “tricking” your 500k pots into being 250k pots. I’m not going to bore you with the science ( Google it if you are interested ) but in our good old quick and dirty fashion we are just going to show you how to do it and throw in the quick explanation that running the 500k resistance of the pot in parallel with the 500k of another resistor switched in it’ll drop the resistance of the 500k pot by half giving you 250k.

You just need to use a 500k push pull volume pot with a 500k resistor wired into the switch so that when you pop the switch up the pot “thinks” its a 250k pot and in the down position it’s just it’s plain old self at 500k. The pot will sound darker in the up position killing off some of the treble responses and making your single coil, or tapped humbucker, sound a little bit sweeter.

Its also a handing trick for quickly swapping tone at the push of a switch.

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Adding series / parallel wiring to a Tele using a push pull pot.

Here is a nice modification to add a fourth tone to your Tele style wiring by giving you the option of using the neck and bridge pickups ( mid position on the 3 way way switch ) in either series, like a wide spaced humbucker ) or in parallel , the standard tone.

You will need to make a small modification to the wires of your neck pickup, which is hopefully one of our Southern Belles. There is a small jumper wire that goes from the metal casing tabs to the black output wire of the of the pickup. You need to snip this connection through so that the casing is isolated from the black wire. You then need to make a new connection by soldering a new wire onto the casing tab and connect this new wire to the common earth circuit on your guitar.

As always don’t forget the wire up the earth connection need from your metal guitar bridge baseplate into the common earth circuit of the guitar to avoid unwanted buzzing when you take your hand off the strings etc.