Do you use the tone knob on your guitar?

[TheBlackBard]

Never... I usually use the hole to install a killswitch.

You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

 

[Alsvartr]

It depends on the guitar. My metal guitars I just use bridge pickup with no tone and sometimes not even a volume.

But I've found hooking up a tone to the bridge strat single coil with something like the greasebucket mod is really awesome. You can keep your strat single sounds and then kick on the distortion and back off the bridge tone and it rolls off highs and lows for a punchy humbucker sound.

 

[mikeymike]

Yes! Super useful control especially when you dial the rig to be VERY bright and then use the tone knob to tame your tone until you need that EXTRA articulation. So satisfying when going for a lead.

 

[Neon_Knight_]

Can be useful for clean and crunch when splitting the coils. Otherwise, not really, in metal context it's 99.9999% useless.

Doom disagrees

 

[Ibanez Rules]

Never needed it, the tone is in my fingers.

Pa dump.

 

[DECEMBER]

I always use it. I have EMG 81X/60X which come with VLPF active tone pots and they provide a much more usable range of tone. It's still defined when rolled off, not just that muddy glob you get from a passive tone.
If I'm playing the high strings on clean then tone is at about 8. Playing the low strings it's at 10. With high gain it's usually around 5. Too much harsh high end with it on 10. And it helps tame the noise.
I also have a variable mid control: concentric pot, 100Hz-1kHz, boost/cut. Usually cutting around 250Hz, the mudrange.
And an EXG expander: boosts bass and treble while cutting the high-mids.
They're all active and I always use all 3.

 

[Riff the Road Dog]

On my guitars that have one, only once in a long while to get just one certain tone that is useful only once in a very long while. In general, I don't like passive tone controls. Rolling off treble is not the same as adding bass, it is it's own thing.

The guitars I use the most are ones I built for myself and I decided long ago to do two volumes instead. No tone pots. Max treble when volume is wide open and can blend them to find the sweet spot.

If I played a clean strat or tele with singles all the time I might find one useful.

 

[Ross82]

Nope. In fact my preference is to not even have a tone knob on my guitars. I need to move one of my strat tones so I can shunt the other tone and volume knob down a space because I HATE the location of strat volume pot. It always gets inadvertently rolled down while playing.

 

[JimboLodisC]

I really don't. And I rarely use the volume knob other than to mute.

In fact for a custom build I switched the tone knob over to a bass cut. That's way more useful to me.

 

[John]

I often turned down the tone knob when I was playing in jazz bands, way back. Otherwise, I rarely mess with it unless it's one of those push-pull (or push-push) types for a coil split.

 

[Ancestor]

Nah. I actually don't like the volume either. I would greatly prefer an on/ off switch. Ah... that's hard rock and metal for ya

 

[Alfredo Ortiz]

I

I almost never use it. It can actually annoy me sometimes if I am dialing in a tone with the amp or modeler and then I realize the tone knob is at less than full. I'll be swapping some pickups in a couple guitars soon and am seriously considering not even wiring up the tone pot.

Actually use this and have it wired for Coil tapping where if I pop up the knob, i get a single coil emulated sound and then i color the tone to taste for a recording season. But live i have it to the max as most people dude.

The annoying part is when you dont relize its turned down thus give a dull sound.. but besides that, i find it super useful in the application i use it in.

 

[SCJR]

Can't live without it. But I think there's merit to the tonal difference of wiring it straight up, a la EVH.

 

[Thaeon]

Depends on the gig. Use it a lot on a jazz gig. Almost never otherwise.

 

[gabito]

No.

I also barely use the volume knob, now that I think about it.

 

[Steinmetzify]

My #1 doesn’t have one so no.

#s 2-3 have them but I only use them for thrash stuff, always on 10 lol

 

[aesthyrian]

Nope. I remove the tone and move the volume to where the tone knob was.

 

[TheRealMikeD]

On all of my guitars, I have either disconnected or removed the tone knobs. Where I have removed them, I usually replace them with series-parallel-coil split toggle switches. But sometimes I leave them in place to keep the look the same, but just disconnect them from the circuit.

That said, I'm a rock/metal player, so tone knobs don't do anything constructive for me. If I were a jazz player, I'd probably use them all the time.

 

[Guitarist_Dad]

Never. I move the volume to the tone spot & put a kill switch where vol pot was before.

 

[Darrin w]

I find myself using it more over the past 10 years or so, I didn't touch it the first 25.