Earlier versions of this entry said 1MΩ audio (log) taper. Per Dave Friedman on Headfirst Amps Panel #11 (Dec 2025), the actual canonical Jose part is a 1MΩ LINEAR push-pull pot, at least when paired with diode clipping. The audio-taper framing — widely circulated in 1980s–2010s online kit instructions — does not match the wiring Friedman recalls from the ~60 Jose amps he's serviced.
Why linear, not audio, when diodes are present (Friedman, ~131:00 in the panel): "As soon as those diodes go on there, the taper of the pot just completely changes." A linear taper paired with a fixed-threshold Zener pair produces a perceived response that approximates audio — because the diode clamp dominates the upper portion of the pot's travel. An audio pot in the same circuit ends up too dark and lifeless in the lower half of the rotation.
Match the taper to the build: - Linear with 20V Zeners (Friedman's recalled Jose default). - Reverse-audio with 12V Zeners (lowest-V Zeners squash the upper half of pot travel; reverse-audio compensates). - Audio is acceptable on no-diode Jose builds (the no-diode "3-mod" family — Mick Mars Dr. Feelgood territory).
1MΩ value still matters. Independent of taper, 1MΩ keeps the cathode-follower output isolated from the tone stack. A lower-impedance pot would load the CF and roll off the upper midrange that's important for the Jose voicing. 1MΩ is high enough to be effectively transparent to the CF. Some Cameron and Friedman production builds use 500kΩ — same broad effect, slightly more CF loading.
Why this correction matters for JMIL: the audio-taper claim was carried into earlier JMIL releases on the strength of widely-circulated kit documentation. Friedman's panel statement is the most-authoritative living-modifier correction to date and the lab now reflects it explicitly rather than passing the old framing forward.
Nuance from Amp Panel #7 (Aug 2025) ~[119:25]: Friedman elaborates that his own production-amp taper choice was *partially driven by pot availability*, not purely by circuit theory: *"I use the linear just for availability on the Jose on the clipping. I didn't really have much of a choice for the pots we used."* This doesn't change the underlying recommendation — linear taper does pair correctly with diodes — but it does mean that "the canonical Jose taper" was, like much of Jose's documented practice, partially driven by what was available on the workbench at the time rather than from a clean engineering ideal. Different surviving Jose amps may have shipped with reverse-audio or other taper combinations depending on what Jose had on hand.