• Adding a no-load pot to your guitar can brighten the tone.electric guitar image by Blue Moon from Fotolia.com
  
  The tone potentiometer, or "pot," in your guitar redirects a portion of the signal from the pickup to ground through a capacitor. A capacitor tends to act as a low-pass filter, rolling off the high frequencies. The less signal goes through the capacitor, the brighter your tone. However, even with the dial turned all the way to 10 the load from the capacitor still affects your tone. A "no-load" potentiometer avoids this by removing the tone control from the circuit entirely when the dial is turned all the way up.
  
  

Brightness

• When you turn the dial to 10, a no-load potentiometer completely removes the potentiometer and capacitor in the tone control from the circuit. The result is that none of your signal is redirected to ground, and the entire output of the pickup goes to the amplifier. Single-coil pickups such as those found on a Fender Stratocaster are naturally very "bright," with a lot of high overtones in the sound, so removing the tone control brightens the tone even more. You're left with the "natural" sound of the pickup, unmodified by the tone control.
  
  

Presence

• In electrical engineering terms, "load" is a measure of all the factors affecting a signal: resistance, capacitance and inductance. The tone control in your guitar involves both a resistor and a capacitor, both of which add load and dampen the signal. With a normal potentiometer, when the dial is turned to 10, the potentiometer is at full resistance. This removes most of the influence of the capacitor, which trims the high end, but puts the full load of the potentiometer on the signal. A no-load pot removes the resistance from the potentiometer so that the signal is stronger as well as brighter.
  
  

Disadvantages

• Adding a no-load potentiometer to your guitar requires either buying one pre-made from Fender, or modifying a potentiometer yourself. Either way you're going to have to open up your guitar and rewire it, so unless you're comfortable soldering, a no-load pot may not be for you. Also, a no-load pot switches off sharply when it's turned to 10, so if you switch it on while you're playing, the initial effect might be abrupt and unpleasant.