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Heck, original 50's Strats used a .1uF there!!!Bad Kitty wrote:A .047 would be WAY too bassy. Those are for single coils. The higher up you go the more treble that's being bled off.
Mike
Unless you're trying to clone some vintage wiring scheme, the tone cap is just personal preference. NO tone caps "give" you more bass--they just bleed more or less treble off to ground, depending on the value of the cap, giving the impression of increased bass. The actual amount of bass is the same, its just that treble frequencies are louder to the ear than bass frequencies at the same given wattage, so you hear them as louder. When they are removed by a tone cap, the bass appears to be more prominent. I still find an .022 cap to be too muddy for my tastes, so I use either a .01, or combine caps to make something in the range of .005 to .009. That produces a really usable tone control, IMO. An .047, or a .1mfd cap makes the guitar very muffled sounding. Another cool little mod is to get a 4 or 5 position rotary switch, and keep the first position lug open (no tone cap), and have gradually increasing cap values in the next positions. So if you used a 5 position switch, you could have 1st position with no effect / 2nd a .0047 cap / 3rd a .009 cap / 4th a .015 cap / and 5th a .022 cap. Kind of a poor mans vari-tone. Also, you could install a push-pull switch tone pot, and connect 2 caps of choice to the switch, giving you 2 different cap options with the pull of a switch, and of course, no effect either way when the pot is fully clockwise.texwest wrote:Seymour Duncan shows .047 on his wiring diagrams so thats what I put in my guitar. So I'll have to try a .022 i guess.
Not much if you use a no-load tone pottexwest wrote:what is the tonal difference between using a .047 and a .022 tone cap in a humbucker loaded guitar?
Thanks
There's a good tutorial here that tells how to make your owndarkbluemurder wrote:A no load pot has its carbon trace cut at one end so it's out of the circuit when turned up full. With a normal tone pot you have the cap connected through a 250k or 500k resistance to ground whereas with a no load pot you have infinite resistance.
(or you can pay $13 a pot and buy a Fender branded one 
):You can tell when you roll back theres less gain. It sounds cleaner and since its all bass it seems like the compression effects in the amp kind of 'take up the slack' from the missing treble and mud it up. I kind of have a catch 22 with lower value caps. I feel tha samne way- they take away too much treble. But with the lower caps I feel like I dont get the subtle tone rolloff when you back it to about 8 or 9 plus when its all the way off I feel like Im playing with a half cocked wahfillmore nyc wrote:Unless you're trying to clone some vintage wiring scheme, the tone cap is just personal preference. NO tone caps "give" you more bass--they just bleed more or less treble off to ground, depending on the value of the cap, giving the impression of increased bass. The actual amount of bass is the same, its just that treble frequencies are louder to the ear than bass frequencies at the same given wattage, so you hear them as louder. When they are removed by a tone cap, the bass appears to be more prominent. I still find an .022 cap to be too muddy for my tastes, so I use either a .01, or combine caps to make something in the range of .005 to .009. That produces a really usable tone control, IMO. An .047, or a .1mfd cap makes the guitar very muffled sounding. Another cool little mod is to get a 4 or 5 position rotary switch, and keep the first position lug open (no tone cap), and have gradually increasing cap values in the next positions. So if you used a 5 position switch, you could have 1st position with no effect / 2nd a .0047 cap / 3rd a .009 cap / 4th a .015 cap / and 5th a .022 cap. Kind of a poor mans vari-tone. Also, you could install a push-pull switch tone pot, and connect 2 caps of choice to the switch, giving you 2 different cap options with the pull of a switch, and of course, no effect either way when the pot is fully clockwise.texwest wrote:Seymour Duncan shows .047 on his wiring diagrams so thats what I put in my guitar. So I'll have to try a .022 i guess.