Pots for Valco / Supro pickups?

[Dnew]

I have a late 50s, early 60s Valco / Supro pickup that I want to use in the bridge position of a telecaster as a homebuild guitar. The pickup is their single coil that looks humbucker-sized. The question is, what value pots would I need? I looked at the original pots from the Supro guitar and they have nothing printed on them. 250k? 500?

Thanks.

[J S Moore]

I would stick with the 250k that are usually used with singles. If you find that it's too dark you can always switch.

If it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of 8k or more you probably will want something more like 500k with .022 caps. But it's really up to your ear. It seems to me those pickups are fairly bright to begin with so the 250k might be better.

[Rick B]

If your pickup has 3+3 offset poles... as opposed to the National humbucker-sized single-coil.. then you have two x approx 2.5k coils in series... the correct '50s spec would be 500k tone w/.050uF cap, 250k volume. This gives a good, fairly extreme boo-wah tone roll-off. They can be bright but the key is to use that tone control.

Edit: I (probably wrongly) assumed you were talking of a Valco steel pickup with a view to mounting it a la Ry Cooder. Don't know the pot values on regular Spanish electric guitars, sorry.

[davidge1]

I used to have a Supro Dual-Tone... it was not a bright guitar at all, it was very dark. At the same time, you could hear that the pickups were not very hot. I always wondered why that was, because low output pickups usually mean a brighter, thinner sound. The Supro definitely had that dark-but-twangy Link Wray sound.