GUITAR POT TAPERS

A question that always pop up when trying to understand Pots and Tapers is an important one.

Most Common: Most Pots on Strats use A or AUDIO Taper. The 2nd most used type is B or LINEAR Taper.

How it works:  With volume and tone pots the amount of reduction between full on and 50% has less resistance change that the last 50% which gives a sonic difference than if you have a linear change.

Our Ears: We don’t hear volume change equality, for example, typically if you are less than a 3 db change you don’t really notice anything.  We also have a variance on how our ears respond to different frequencies volume wise. Because of our non linear response a audio taper “sounds’ correct to us.

Lefties: Left handed guitars require “reverse taper” to be correct for a left handed person. If you put a right handed pot on a left handed guitar the audio taper will be backwards, changing the most at first and less later.