Looking for left handed potentiometers for a Yamaha guitar or bass? You won’t be able to get the original parts.
I was recently looking for two guitar potentiometers for a customer’s Pacifica 112JL, a left handed model. These guitars use a 15C 500k pot and a 05C 250k pot for the respective Volume and Tone controls. Both guitar pots are Reverse-Audio, denoted by the letter ‘C’. The technical document offered part numbers QC798600 and QC798700 however these had been discontinued with substitutes offered in their place. I reluctantly ordered them, in the hope they would be correct. Of course, what did I end up receiving? – Standard ‘A’ pots.
I called around to see if I could get any more information. I ended up speaking to Steve who’s a tech at Yamaha London. He explained the reason why the original parts have been “discontinued”.
It isn’t that Yamaha have stopped the production of these potentiometers, they were never manufacturing them in the first place. Yamaha produce so few left handed models that it isn’t cost effective for them to do short production runs of the smaller parts required for them. Instead, they source them from other guitar manufacturers with much large runs of left handed parts. I guess they get them from whoever has them available and at the best when they come to make left handed guitars. This is common practice for left handed Yamaha guitars; it keeps costs down, maintains margins and keeps Yamaha’s lefty guitars at the same retail price as standard models.
The Solution
This does mean that you will have to source replacement guitar pots from someone other than Yamaha Guitar Parts. Armed with the pot’s specification above, you should be able to find a suitable replacement. (Try our range of guitar pots)
With other Pacifica left handed parts, however, you might be in luck. Items like the machine heads, tremolo bridge, etc. are apparently all still in production. They aren’t readily available, with up to a 6 week wait, but it’s worth the wait for an original part. However, I’d warn you that, even though they say they’re available, you may well end up with the incorrect part, as I discovered with these potentiometers.
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