Silver Sky Gut shots

John Beef

John Beef

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This is interesting. There's a resistor between the hot and ground on the volume pot. I can see the top band is red, bottom is gold, but can't make out the 2 other colors. Sort of looks like Red, green, blue but that would be 25 million ohms. That's a lot! Wouldn't effect anything in a guitar circuit. If it's red green black that would be 25 ohms. That's not very much! that would have huge impacts on the guitar's sound. Quite likely make very little sound come out of it at all. Any resistor in there would alter the resistance value of the pot.

Anyway, I've never seen this before and wonder why they would want to change the pot's value?

IMG_20180520_1258164.jpg
 
garrett

garrett

...
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John Beef said:
This is interesting. There's a resistor between the hot and ground on the volume pot. I can see the top band is red, bottom is gold, but can't make out the 2 other colors. Sort of looks like Red, green, blue but that would be 25 million ohms. That's a lot! Wouldn't effect anything in a guitar circuit. If it's red green black that would be 25 ohms. That's not very much! that would have huge impacts on the guitar's sound. Quite likely make very little sound come out of it at all. Any resistor in there would alter the resistance value of the pot.

Anyway, I've never seen this before and wonder why they would want to change the pot's value?

IMG_20180520_1258164.jpg
Click to expand...

It's a 300 k pot with a 2.7 meg resistor, so that would make it 270 k total resistance. In theory, at least; actual value will vary within the tolerances of the pot and resistor.
 
DreamTheaterRules

DreamTheaterRules

Ben Dover
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Maybe Paul is playing a Jedi JM mind trick, and taking whatever value the pot tests at, and putting in whatever resistor makes it match JMs perfect resistance value. Wouldn't that blow you away.

Seriously, pots have by far the biggest variance of any "good" parts used in amps, pedals or whatever. You can easily get 1% variance in caps and 5% in resistors, but even "good" pots usually test around 20-25% variance from spec. (Unless PRS starts using really high end pots like some of the Bourn or something. Heck the best ones wouldn't even fit in a guitar!) Like I said, I've read amp and pedal makers before say they sold off as much as 70% of what they bought and only kept those within say 5% of the value they wanted.
 
garrett

garrett

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DreamTheaterRules said:
Maybe Paul is playing a Jedi JM mind trick, and taking whatever value the pot tests at, and putting in whatever resistor makes it match JMs perfect resistance value. Wouldn't that blow you away.

Seriously, pots have by far the biggest variance of any "good" parts used in amps, pedals or whatever. You can easily get 1% variance in caps and 5% in resistors, but even "good" pots usually test around 20-25% variance from spec. (Unless PRS starts using really high end pots like some of the Bourn or something. Heck the best ones wouldn't even fit in a guitar!) Like I said, I've read amp and pedal makers before say they sold off as much as 70% of what they bought and only kept those within say 5% of the value they wanted.
Click to expand...

I think it's just a practical solution to make sure the pot value stays within an acceptable range. For example, the RS Guitarworks SuperPot is 280k with about 10% tolerance to keep it within 250-300k. Assuming PRS are able to get 300k pots from CTS at 10% tolerance, they can spend a penny on a resistor to get a similar result from standard components.

10% tolerance is easy enough to find with pots. The Mojotone pots are 7% and at a fair cost. The regular PRS 500k pots must be 20% at least, as I have one that measures 400k.

End of day, though, the difference is so slight I'm confident 99% of players would never know the difference. My feeling is it's one of Paul's tone nit-picks based on what he hears with his magic ears.
 
J

JJJ

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Mar 21, 2018
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Nut looks a lot to me like an old strat nut, they really aren't very tall comepared to modern PRS ones

Also I am surprised there aren't metal baseplates on those pickups, given Paul is in the spirit of improvement, they were only omitted from strats back in the day to save money.
 
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