mixing pot brands?

[nognow]

I recently noticed that the taper of my audio Alpha pots is anything but an audio taper.
I thought about buying all cts or all Bourns pots.
which works fine for a guitar or a single Fuzz face ,but I am planning on building like 10 pedal and the price on pots alone would go though the roof.
so I thought ,maybe I can buy Alpha for all B taper pots ,and buy CTS or Bourns for all A and C tapers...
is it a good idea? has it been done before? would the different pots feel "weird" to turn?

Thanks!

[GibsonGM]

I recently noticed that the taper of my audio Alpha pots is anything but an audio taper.
I thought about buying all cts or all Bourns pots.
which works fine for a guitar or a single Fuzz face ,but I am planning on building like 10 pedal and the price on pots alone would go though the roof.
so I thought ,maybe I can buy Alpha for all B taper pots ,and buy CTS or Bourns for all A and C tapers...
is it a good idea? has it been done before? would the different pots feel "weird" to turn?

Thanks!

No reason at ALL that you can't do that, nogow!  Have at it.    I suppose they could really be a little 'different' in construction, but seriously doubt you'd ever know it.  Esp. if ALL your audio are from one manufacturer, and all linear from another, etc. 

I'd mix and match ANY of them, personally - A, B tapers, whatever.  Only place I can think where it may matter would be if you have something dual-ganged, like a stereo volume control (or the tuning section of a superhet receiver, lol).    No worries.

[petemoore]

 You can 'bend' the taper of variable resistive dividers [pots] using stop [on an outside lug or two] and/or tapering resistors [across pot lugs in some fashion].
The 'feel' can be 'improved' using felt washers [useful for strat volumes that get 'bumped' from their setting to easily, so rotation takes a bit more torque, if they're too 'stiff' to begin with...I don't know that they can be 'loosened'.
  I started putting stop resistors at ''the bottom'' of all my volume pots [except guitar] so they turn to almost all the way down, but never shunt all signal to ground. I did this after tearing down my pedalboard and distortion pedals a couple times so I could ''debug'' the volume pot, allowing the pedal to turn 'on' once again by rotating the volume pot from fully CCW.
  Also charted the taper of pots for a while...mount the pot in a panel with position indicator numbers, create a graph with resistance being vertical, pot shaft position as the horizontal numbers, charting 1/2 of the pot [the other half of course can be subtracted from measured pot value or the pots wafer resistance].
  RG has an article ''the secret life of pots'' and shows disassembly, sanding the wafer to alter it's taper, reassembly of pot with the altered wafer thickness/shape = different R curves.
  I use salvage and alpha for >90% of build needs, 'fancy pot' for the guitar and the wah, occasionally pressing LDR's to vary resistance[s.

[duck_arse]

I've found the most of the stiffness comes from the grease/gunk around the shaft, in the bushing. you can loosen the rotation with EML or similar cleaner, if you spray enuff of it into the guts, shaft down so the goop runs away from the delicates.