Anyone experimented with pots/capacitors on Bardens?

[Kurt]

I installed Bardens on my 98 AS. I love the pups and have no particular reason to make any other mods. However, I'd like to know if anyone has played around with pots/capacitors and come up with a sound that they prefer. Thanks in advance.

[JCollins]

I have experimented with different value pots, with Bardens, in both Teles and Strats. I've tried the following combos: 250K for both volume and tone; 500K for both volume and tone; and 500K for volume and 250K for tone.

Whenever a 500K volume pot was used, the treble loss, when the volume was rolled off, was unacceptable, so a treble bypass cap was necessary. The most natural sounding bypass cap (to me, of course), was about 120pf. Any larger than that, and the treble appeared to increase as I rolled off the volume. (The increase is, of course, an illusion. It cannot be increased in a passive system, but it appeared to increase, because too much highs were being allowed to pass through.)

I really hated the 500K volume pot. At full volume, the sound was annoyingly, even painfully bright. Even as the volume was rolled off, the tone was always on the shrill side. With 250K volume and tone pots, the tone was bright, but full and pleasing. I did not think that a bypass cap was needed with a 250K volume pot.

I always used a .047uF tone cap with Bardens, in a Tele. Those pickups are pretty bright, and I didn't think they needed a smaller tone cap. Other types of pickups may benefit from a smaller tone cap, but not the Bardens. (Currently, I use .01uF tone caps in my Teles, with alnico II pickups.)

On a Strat, my best Barden tones were achieved when I rewired the guitar's tone controls. I rewired it so that the middle control was a tone for both the neck and middle pickup. For this, I used the vintage .1uF value. The outside control was a tone control for the bridge pickup, only, and it had its own capacitor. For this, I used a .047uF cap. When I did this, the tone controls suddenly became very usable. (Prior to this, I always maxed both tone controls, regardless of the pickups I used.)