Different pot values?

[mmmguitar]

Hey, all. Has anyone used or previously experimented with different pot and cap values in their Flys (perhaps while auditioning different pickups)?

I've been doing some tinkering and comparing between various guitars and pickups (Flys included) in the course of putting a set of Suhr Thornbuckers through their paces. It could just be that my hearing is shot when I say that I find myself preferring the sounds of Fly pickups with lower resonant peaks wired to bypass the pots, in comparison to lower-output pickups with their highs attenuated by the 250kΩ pots I've been using (Until now, my 13 pin Flys have utilized dual gang 250kΩ master volumes for the mag/hex circuits; for the sake of having fewer knobs on the face of the guitar).

I find the pickups with lower windings/higher resonant peaks are (as expected) a bit overbearing with the Fly’s pots bypassed. Though the process of chasing/dialing in a "goldilocks" zone with each guitar is nothing new for me, being confronted with the extent to which I was taking a single component for granted is always exciting; because it's an opportunity to learn something (even if that "something" is that I should give up playing bad guitar).

I'm going to see if a 1meg volume pot paired with a no-load 500kΩ tone will land me closer to an ideal compromise between clarity and room to attenuate when needed. This also resets my Fly pickup comparison recording endeavors to square one; as I currently feel that recording everything with minimal potentiometer attenuation affecting the various pickups will prove more helpful in distinguishing them (or potentially make them all sound terrible).

...

4/8/23 Update: Goldilocks zone achieved: A 12kΩ, medium-output Alnico V humbucker in the bridge with a 1MΩ volume pot and adjustable high-pass filter dialed in to get the taper to my liking gives me what I want out of my '96 Deluxe. With that pickup good to go, the aid of a 330kΩ resistor makes sure the low output neck humbucker keeps its high end tamed (that pickup sees the 1MΩ pot as 248kΩ when selected).