Tubescreamer 20K Pot

[captntasty]

I just built the tonepad tubescreamer but didn't have the 20K tone pot - used a 10K instead... I was wondering how important the 20K is to the overall sound?  I searched but found no info.
Thanks

[drewl]

Well it's going to limit the range of tone control and lower the gain of that stage slightly.
25k pots (or 22k) are common and what I usually use, but you could try going up in value it may sound better, and you can even put a resistor in parallel with a larger pot to bring the resistance value down to around 20k.

[captntasty]

I tried a 50K with no success - sputters and hiss is all that it generates, no guitar signal.  It seems to have plenty of gain but there is no high freq's - very muffled sounding.  I know this effect is all about mids but it seems a bit strange.  Otherwise the sound is great, just wish it had more high end.

[John Lyons]

10K or even 5K works great.
20K is very dark sounding when fully CCW anyway.
Most of the action is in the last 25% of that 20K anyway.
Anything larger than 20K is going to be very dark sounding.


john

[captntasty]

Thanks john... this pedal is definitely dark sounding.  I think I'll stick with the 10K that's in there.