Replacing Your Guitar’s Tone Pot

A common issue electric guitarists face is a tone potentiometer (hereafter tone pot) that, when turned, makes scratching and hissing noisesl. You should first try to clean a problematic tone pot with contact cleaner and, if that doesn’t fix the problem, chances are you have a bad tone pot that needs to be replaced.

Tone pots fine-tune your guitar’s tone by sharpening or deadening the output signal and over time wear, tear, and corrosion can damage the pot’s contacts, causing it to malfunction (i.e. causing scratching or other unwanted noises). On the bright side, replacing your tone pot is quite easy and straightforward, requiring only around fifteen minutes with your soldering iron or soldering station.

Step One

Disconnect your guitar from your amplifier and remove the cable. If your guitar has any active components, remove the batteries. You should never work on your electric guitar when the instrument is powered on because it can damage or ruin the guitar’s components. Remove the screws holding on the guitar’s back plate and then remove the plate.

Step Two

Remove the tone pot’s knob. Loosen the tone pot’s retaining nut with an adjustable wrench and unscrew the nut by hand, removing the nut and lock washer.

Step Three

Remove the tone pot from the guitar. Use a small piece of masking tape to protect each wire leading from the pot. It’s a good idea to write where each wire is soldered to the tone pot on these pieces of tape.

Step Four

Use wire cutters to cut the wire as close as possible to the old tone pot’s pins and remove the pot. Strip insulation from the end of each wire, twist the wire ends, and wrap them around the new tone pot’s pins using the notes you wrote on the masking tape in the previous step.

Step Five

Use your soldering iron or soldering station to solder the wires to the new tone pot’s pins, making sure to let the solder cool completely. Insert the new pot into your guitar and make sure your pot’s post fits and sits correctly and comes out the front of the guitar at the right angle.

Step Six

Next you’ll place the lock washer and retaining on the tone pot’s post’s threads and tighten the nut by hand. Finish by tightening the nut with the adjustable wrench.

Step Seven

Replace the knob on the tone pot’s post and secure the back plate back on the guitar and test out your new, noise-free tone pot.