volume switch

[mjs]

Might be a strange inquiry but suppose I wanted to wire up a switch to simulate Full Volume/Half Volume from a 500k volume pot with fixed resistors. Which one of these looks correct or are they both totally wrong?

[mike fried]

The wiring on the right-hand diagram is correct (classic voltage divider), but your resistor values are only correct if you're actually wanting the halfway position of a linear taper pot. If you're wanting to mimic an audio taper pot (usually "10% taper") at halfway, you'll want a 47k-51k resistor to ground and a 390k-470k resistor in series to the output. You may want to check the pot's resistance to ground on the specific guitar when set where you want the volume, then pick the nearest value resistor you can find (or build the value from multiple resistors); it's value is the more critical of the two for setting the output volume.

[mjs]

Brilliant! Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I think I might be in the minority in preferring a linear taper for volume and tone. It seems easier to fine tune that way. Log always feels a bit jumpy to me. Thanks again!