Tone pot replacement

[Krysbass]

A few years ago I replaced the stock pickups on my Stagg BC300 fretless with a DiMarzio P/J set and although the bass now sounds great, the tone control crackles and needs replaced (I’ve used electrical contact cleaner on it, but to no avail.)

A further issue is that rotating the tone control has always reduced the treble very gradually throughout most of its rotation but then in the last few millimetres of travel the treble suddenly drops away completely. I’d prefer the tone pot to operate more evenly throughout its rotation, so presumably I need to use a pot with a different resistance to the 500k one fitted to the bass. Question is, do I need greater or less resistance than 500k to give the more even operation that I’m looking for?

All advice greatly appreciated.

[Al Heeley]

not the max resistance but the taper - the ramp of resistance change. sounds like you may have a log pot which are normally used for volume pots, you need a linear one. Cheaper pots tend to have uneven ramp where all the change is in a small sweep.

[Krysbass]

[quote name='Al Heeley' post='930212' date='Aug 19 2010, 07:44 PM']not the max resistance but the taper - the ramp of resistance change. sounds like you may have a log pot which are normally used for volume pots, you need a linear one. Cheaper pots tend to have uneven ramp where all the change is in a small sweep.[/quote]

Thanks for that - the pot on the bass is a "mini" pot and in line with the bass's humble origins is probably as cheap and nasty as it gets. I'll replace it with a better quality linear pot of the same rating and see how it goes.

Cheers

KB