vol/tone pot problems

[shinobi]

i've just noticed something wrong with my aerodyne jazz bass

i had to urge to play (at 12am) and being the considerate person that i am, i turned down the volume using the volume pots on the bass instead of the amp (lazy)

it so happened that i chose to use solely the neck pickup with the tone rolled off. thats when i realised that the taper of the vol pot was really horrendous... jazz knobs dont have numbers so its abit hard to explain... but say, from 12 (full) to 10 o'clock (anticlockwise), PAST 10 there is a huge drop in the volume. any further and it ranges from barely audible to silent.

when i tried the bridge pup instead, the same thing happened. i don't know about the tone knob, i'm too distraught to go and figure it out.

i don't remember having this problem before. if it was like this all along, i don't know how i couldn't have noticed it. but seriously, this is news to me, bad news.

now it also seems as if there are grounding problems too (it sounds more like amp grounding rather than the bass) but i dunno if i'm just being paranoid

bass doctor, please diagnose the situation

 

[itzs]

http://www.bothner.co.za/articles/volumepot.shtml

this might help explain things (scroll down to the part on "Taper")

As for the grounding issue, if you're soloing the pickups, and they are single coils, u will definitely get hum. if its both pickups on, and you're too near to the amp, you might get some hum as well.

 

[shinobi]

i investigated further... the tone pot is fine. but the problem seems to arise when i solo pickups and roll off the tone. when the tone is increased the taper is more or less acceptable

 

[itzs]

Does the same thing happen if u put both pickups on at low volume, and roll off the tone? If so, it might be just that the human ear is less sensitive to low frequencies (which are all thats left after u roll off the tone)

I always use at leat one pickup on at full volume anyway. =)