Best pot value with Blue Note HSP90s?

[gracehoper]

Hi guys

So a bought a set of Blue Note HSP90s for a Japanese 70s 330/335 copy I got - hollow body with no center block but with humbucker sized pickups. Now while the pickups are humbucker sized they were actually a sort of (pretty bad) single coils.
I went and got the pickups changed and was immediately slightly baffled with the dark and whooly sound coming from my new BK pickups that cost more than the guitar. I then realized that it was probably the value of the pots that must be 250k or something rather low for the old single coils. And they had not been changed.

My question is now what the best pot value would be (both for tone and volume pots) to make my cheap lawsuit guitar sound as close to a nice 330 as possible.


Cheers

[Kiichi]

If it is 250 in there I am not shocked that it is a bit dull. I run all my P90s on 500 personally. Not having any issues with that. All on full I get the single coil feel, but with all the nice weight of a P90. From there I can dial it down when I donīt want the full bright clean strumming sound, but rather go jazzy, or have the leads more rounded, or when I want my rhythm to fill and not cut.

Leads to having to use the pots more, but to me it is very rewarding once I got used to it. Such a range of tones.

[gracehoper]

Thanks for your answer. Would that be 500k in both volume and tone pots?

[Kiichi]

`Tis what I am running. In a P90 / HB setup (MQ / Crawler) the neck is noticably brighter in the top end, but not harsh or brittle. SC character coming through, but full like a HB. Lovingly balanced. Manhattan neck is brighter yet, which is great for strummy cleans, and it can go down to singing no issue like that. The distortion with the tone a bit down is so psychedelic. My Supermassive Stockholm set I almost always have on full, but the pots still work.

Should that run into issues, especially if you have a hard time finding sweet spots on the tone: The taper on the tone pot is of quite a bit of consequence, plus 50s wiring or a treble bleed. The 50s especially changes the feel of the pots a lot.