Working with musicians can lead to interesting, and sometimes, contradictory experiences as many musicians have ears bigger than their bank account. This encourages such statements as, "I need you to help me get a hotter sound from my guitar. Money is no object, but I'm kinda broke right now. Is there a cheap way to fix it up?" It is at about this time that the business man inside me begins to weep, and I turn away and reluctantly answer, "Yes".

     When we think of boosting tonal performance on our guitars, at least when it is in the direction of creating a hotter sound with more gain and output, we tend to conjure up images of changing pickups or adding preamps. These are, of course, tried and true methods to heat up your sound, and do offer a dramatic change in tone, but with a more substantial investment required on your part. How about an effective, but inexpensive alternative?

     Let's try and approach the problem from a different perspective. Instead of trying to find a way to increase gain on the guitar, let's go to the place on the guitar that loses gain - your volume control - and see if we can reduce the amount of gain lost, thereby allowing us to get more of the signal from the guitar's pickups to the amplifier.

     First let's get an understanding of how this control works. The volume control is a variable resistor, actually two variable resistors, called a potentiometer which controls the flow of the signal coming from the guitars pickups. The potentiometer has three terminals on it. One terminal is connected to ground, one is the input and is connected to the pickups, and the middle terminal, the output of the guitar, is attached internally to a conductive element known as the wiper. As you turn the shaft on the potentiometer, it moves the wiper. Moving it one direction increases the resistance between the wiper and grounded terminal, and at the same time decreases the resistance between the wiper and pickup terminal. Of course, moving the wiper in the opposite direction will produce the opposite result. When the volume control is on 10, there is no resistance between the wiper and the terminal of the pot which the pickups are attached to, and there is maximum resistance between the wiper and the terminal attached to ground. When you are at 0, there is no resistance between the wiper and the terminal attached to ground. This means your guitar is "grounded out" which effectively turns your guitar off. Now how is knowing this going to give you a hotter sound?

     Simple. Remember that a potentiometer is basically two resistors in one housing. On a typical volume pot of 250k ohms there is a portion of the guitar signal being bled off from the 250k ohm resistance between the wiper and the terminal connected to ground. This "loads down" the signal from the guitar before it gets to the amp and knocks off quite a bit of gain. The trick to getting a hotter sound out of your guitar is to increase the resistance here. All you need to do is put in a higher value pot. The higher the pot, the higher the resistance, the less your signal will be bled to ground and the more of your signal will make it to your amp.

     I like to use 500k pots on Strats or other guitars which have a somewhat weaker output and have used 1 meg and even 2 meg pots on guitars with higher output pickups. You'll find your guitar will become louder, more aggressive, and more full-bodied with an increase in top-end brilliance. Of course, you can always turn the volume control down when you need a sweeter, more mellower sound. But where would the fun be in that?