Are Higher Value Pots The Key To "Modern" Burst Tone? (w/ Nostalgic Pots)

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Last month I swapped out my tried-and-true VIPots for a set of 'hybrid' pots put together by Nostalgic in Texas (aka Taylor Speers!) These are genuine, vintage Centralab carbon tracks and wipers - exactly what would have been used in original Burst Les Pauls - that have been taken out of larger enclosures and housed in CTS metalwork....so they look like CTS 500k pots, and the shells are CTS, but everything that makes a difference to how the pot sounds and behaves is real vintage Centralab. Cool, eh?

Those pots I used before were 500k (approximately...some were up in the 550k+ range, just like the VIPots are) - and as we heard, they made a subtle but noticeable effect to how the guitar sounded....to my ears, it had slightly more 'snap' and a less dense lower midrange. Only a slight change, but definitely a noticeable one. (Those particular pots had a linear taper - which isn't what Bursts would have had - but we worked with it to compare them!)

Today though, we're going to try something a little different - for two notable reasons. Firstly, and as previously mentioned, original Centralab pots did have a habit of reading at higher than 500k when they were new....some varied more than others, but Taylor has recently found a NOS guitar-sized "500k" Centralab, completely unused, that reads as 675k. So whilst some Bursts will have had 500k pots from new, it's very likely that others shipped with pots reading significantly higher.

But possibly more interestingly, many Burst owners in recent years have measured the pots in their 60+ year old instruments, and found them reading even higher than that (sometimes up in the 7/8/900k range)....and, often with the volume pots reading much higher than the tones. The speculation for why this is is that when you use a pot, and the wiper drags along the carbon track, over many., many years the resistive material will wear away, and the value of the pot will therefore creep up. Yes, we guitarists do use the tone knobs, but our volume knobs generally get a lot more use.....so, more wear over many decades is thought to create the offset between Vol + Tone readings in the same guitar, which were most likely from the same original batch of pots.

Many of us nowadays watch channels such as Emerald City Guitars, Carter Vintage, etc, and drool over the demos of original Bursts creating these gorgeous tones. But with many of those guitars likely having had higher pot values from new, AND with 60 years of wear on them to raise the resistances even further, it's very likely that the "modern" Burst tones we're hearing in demos are being created through pots reading a long way above 500k.

So, we're going to put this to the test. I'm going to compare the original set of 500-ish Nostalgic hybrid pots to a new set - the volumes up in the 8/900k range, and the tones around 750k, which is what many original Bursts read in at nowadays.

What do you think? Which set of pots was your favourite? Which made my LP sound more like a 'modern' Burst recording in the demo videos we all love? Comment below!

Guitar is a 1992 Les Paul Standard with ThroBak SLE-101 PAFs. Amp is a Vajra JTM45 clone running into a Zilla Studio Pro 2x12 cabinet loaded with Scumback S75-PVC AlNiCo and Celestion AlNiCo Gold speakers. Recorded with Aston Spirit Condenser, '70s Sennheiser MD441 and sE RNR1 ribbon mics, with a Schoeps CMC6 room mic.

0:00 Intro
7:05 Comparison
14:56 Outro


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