How to reduce the ‘effective throw/travel’ of a volume pot?

pricklyrobot

pricklyrobot

Well-known member
A buddy of mine who’s a pedal steel player was asking me about modifying his guitar volume pot to make it easier to do volume swells with his pinky.

Basically he’d like it if the knob hit Minimum volume somewhere around a half turn rather than at full counter-clockwise.

Like so:
IMG_0456.jpeg

He’s pretty sure there’s a 250k (I assume A-taper) in there now. If it was a linear pot I’d assume you could just swap in a 500k and get the desired ‘range narrowing’. But not sure that would work with a log pot… 🤔

I could just grab some pots out of my stash and start experimenting, and I probably will do that. Just wondered if anybody knows the correct math-y/science-y way to figure this out ;)
 
Two ideas
-Use just one gang of an MN taper pot. Could get one with a center detent for full up(mid) position.
-maybe a center tapped pot with the center tap shorted to the max resistance lug(not sure about this one, may not work, may cause the taper to be weird. If the taper is weird, try a linear pot. Should give it a semi log taper, at least in my brain)
 
I think the 500k linear idea would work, but use a 1meg linear with a resistor connected to the wiper and Max lugs. Start with a 500k resistor to see how the taper is, maybe go up or down from there.

Here is a Taper Calculator (click on "Tapered Pot") to help figure out the best resistor to use. Just remember you are only using 1/2 of the pots travel.
 
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