I'm working on a couple of designs, at the moment, and one of the ideas I've been toying around with is the idea of using rotary switches in place of pots for purposes of tone controls.
The idea:
The guitar has 2 tone switches, one for highs and one for lows. Both are 3-way rotary switches, with the equivalent of a standard pot set at 0, a pot set at 5, and a pot set at 10.
Now, it strikes me that the upsides to this would be that for a gigging guitar, you could have a much more consistent tone, considering the finicky nature of tone knobs, and also for a gigging guitar, the rotary switch having less contact surface would make it a longer time before you have to take the guitar apart and clean the guts to avoid those nasty "dirty pot pops."
However, as limited as my electronics knowledge is, it seems that the downside would be the wiring loop's cumbersome size- unless somebody here has a shortcut I might be missing, this approach would require 3 branches, with "fixed" resistors (say 250uF, 500uF, and 1000uF) for each closed loop. Anybody have any thoughts on this?