At this point I should recommend a little reading, The Secret Life of Pots
Basically there are three main types of pot, linear taper, logarithmic taper, and reverse log taper.
A linear taper pot has a consistent sweep ie. at the halfway point you get half the value of the pot in terms of resistance. This is the most common type of pot.
A logarithmic pot increases in resistance quite slowly and then increases a lot more towards the end of the sweep. This is much better suited to things like volume knobs because we perceive sound in a logarithmic fashion. This way you could sort of get the volume to be 'half' as loud when the pot is at halfway.
A reverse log pot does the opposite, a sharp increase to begin with and less so towards the end. This can be emulated by putting a resistor across lugs 1 and 2 of a linear pot, but the maths behind it means that you need two very different values to get the best results, and even then the final maximum value is different to either of the two values you started with.
What's this got to do with left handed guitars? We'll most good right handed guitars will have log volume pots in them. Cheaper ones will have linear, which isn't so bad in the bedroom, but will be less useful in a live situation.
Most Left handed guitars will either come:
- Wired as right handed ie. clockwise turn to turn up volume, this is not a bad solution but it's counter intuitive for a lefty, because ideally you want the guitar to be at full volume when you pull up on the volume knob with your little finger ie. full anticlockwise
- Wired as left handed but with a linear pot, not the end of the world
- Wired as left handed but with a log pot, cannot emphasise how bad this is, the volume almost sounds like an on off switch.
That is why I've managed to find some reverse log pots for my guitar. C250k. The site was Bitsbox. I might actually find the volume knob useful yet. If you're left handed, check the pot values in your guitar. A is audio, B linear, and C reverse log.
