Question about cumulative resistance load of volume and tone pots and the effect on tone

Not quite.

Yes, you can replace the two parallel potentiometers of 100k and 500k with a single fixed resistor of 83k. But when the tone pot is open the cap is effectively out of circuit (because it's in series with the full 500k of its pot). So, you do not need the cap but I doubt you'll hear any difference one way or the other.

You can also get a bunch of resistors (and caps if you want) cheap and some alligator clips. You're on the right track to understand what you're trying to accomplish. You can try a bunch of things for less than $10 and tell us about it. Hearing it, especially with quick a/b comparisons through your favorite amp, is worth way more than anything any of us can describe for you.

Thank you guys!!

Peegoo, as I read your reply, I found myself thinking (and smiling) about my dad and his love of golf and his endless pursuit of the perfect swing. I can remember many conversations with him where he would tell me that he had finally found the right technique or combination of factors, and then two weeks later he would be unsatisfied and searching again. I do the same thing with my guitars!

Your question about why I am adding something that subtracts got me thinking about how best to define what I am searching for tone wise. I think the best way I can describe it is that there is a nasal quality that I doesn't sound good to me and that I would like to subtract/"filter". I've tried wiring guitars without control pots, and tried different amp settings, etc, but haven't been able to find the right balance between getting rid of those nasal frequencies while not being too bright or losing tone and clarity, etc. Part of me wonders if this just how bridge and middle pickups sound in my hands as all of my guitars seem to have this nasally quality when I am playing those position pickups - regardless of whether hum bucker, single coil, P-90 etc. For this guitar, the one thing I have not yet tried is going with lower impedance values like some of the component values that Teisco used (though I know Teisco used a bunch of different pot values). I thought the lower impedance values might be worth trying and seeing how that then fits with what I can adjust on my amp, etc.

Thanks again guys!!

Thanks for this Peegoo. I ran the test that you described and it seems like the frequency I'm hearing is @1.2k. What I found as I reduced those frequencies though in my DAW's EQ, is that reducing them rendered the overall sound less "lively" and was not an improvement. I have now tried a number of setups and it seems that the pickup straight to output jack, no controls, no fixed resistor and cap, is the best overall sound.

It warms my heart that you went through this exercise!  That "lively" descriptor is perfect.  Discovering something on my own, rather than blindly following goofy Internet folklore or trends (Bad Monkey, anyone?) is the pathway to happiness for me as a player.

Oh boy, here comes a total digression.

There's a very weird thing about how we hear sound: what we think sounds good is often bad, and what we think is bad is often actually good.  I learned this years ago in my gigging days, and it was a total mind blow.  

Like most guitar players I would tweak my sounds at home, get to the gig, set up, and play with minimal adjustments to anything but my overall volume.  At one gig the club provided a sound guy, and at sound check he came over and asked me if he could tweak my amp.  Sure...I'm just the guitar player.  So he dropped the lows to almost nothing and pushed the upper mids.  Not a sound I liked.  Then he went back to the board, made some tweaks there, and we went on with the show.  But it simply worked; the guitar was cutting through the mix without having to push the volume up.  I didn't have to stand in the beam of my amp to hear myself.  After the gig the bass player and drummer commented I never sounded so good.

Later, I plugged in the amp at home and the tone was pretty shrill sounding.  Thin and nasal.  But none of the controls had moved since the gig; my amp traveled in a road case.  This is when the mind blow happened: so THAT's why so many guitar players are almost always too dang loud! 

It's precisely why guitarists cannot hear themselves...they turn up the volume so they can hear, and now the bass player can't hear so well, and the drummer starts hitting harder, and the PA gets pushed up near max volume, and things are completely out of control. If you've ever played a jam you know exactly what this is.  If you've ever been in a bar where a weekend warrior band is playing, you know exactly what this is.

It's because guitar amps need to be adjusted to occupy a space of their own in the frequency spectrum.  Stay in your own lane and don't compete with the bass and drums.  Stay in the upper mids and the guitar cuts through like a hot knife through butter. 



Thank You, Sound Guy Whose Name is Lost in the Fog of History.

When we play at home, we love that full-range tone with plenty of low-end thump.  In a band situation, all it does is make for a sludgy low-end 'mung' sound in the room, and nobody can hear themselves think.  If you're in a band like The Melvins, sludge and mung is good!  In most other situations, not so much. 

In a recording, this usually results in having to overcompress a lot of the tracks, and that "lively" sound gets squished flat.

So when players ask me how to cut through a mix without being loud, I show them this.

flic.kr/ps/3YtooLHere is the guitar in question. I made it out of roasted pine and attempted to do a hand applied sun burst finish with some Unicorn Spit paints and Wipe on Poly. This started out with just a hum bucker in the middle position, I then added a neck pickup, and finally decided to just go with the single Goldfoil in the bridge.  That left me with some holes in the front of the guitar. I decided to cover those with a 45rpm single. This is where the story gets interesting.

I have The Clash's promo 45 that Epic records put out with "Train in vain" on the A side and "London Calling" on the B side.  I did not want to sacrifice that 45 for this, but I was able to scan and recreate the labels adding the wood grain in the center. I made up (2) using 45's that I was willing to sacrifice and my recreated labels. I put "Train in Vain" on the front of the guitar and "London Calling" on the back.

"Train in Vain" is one of my all time favorite songs.  When it first came out I made a 120 minute cassette tape of nothing but that song repeated over and over. That was the sound track that I typed papers to for a whole semester.

I used the app Canva to make the label. I scanned both sides of the actual 45 and then used that image for one layer of the label. I took a photo of the lower back portion of the guitar body and was able to adjust the tint and coloration of that photo in Canva to match the wood grain for both the front and back of the guitar. That adjusted photo became the bottom layer of the label. The label is printed on vinyl sticker "paper" and should hold up quite well.