Lovely tone cap discovery

[fdesalvo]

Swapped in a .oo2uf ap onto a 500K tone pot and rolling it slightly back removes single coil sparkle.  Full off turns my single coil tones into thicker p90 tones.  Zero mud and cocked wah tone.  Stays clear.  A really useful treat!

 

[daniel.dimitri]

yep, the pickup normally forms a resonant circuit with the cable which has capacitance. the same happens when the tone is turned all the way down. normally the type of circuit used in the tone control is considered a low pass filter and it is. but because it's not buffered to isolate the components the pickup which is an inductor and the capacitor interact in other ways as well. most techs suggest that because a single is brighter and also because it's lower inductance raises the roll off frequency as compared to hotter pickups that you need a large capacitor. but i never really liked how stock tone controls work because they seem to do one thing at first but at the bottom of the range they turn to mud. a small cap prevents the mud and it also can simulate a hotter pickup by lowering the resonant frequency to something reasonable. you can try to tune it a bit more by playing with resistors across the volume pot. using a higher value pot will allow you to make that peak more pronounced, the peak will have a higher amplitude.

the fender tbx control effectively changes the volume pot value in one half of the range and is a tone pot in the other. if you used a tbx control (or 2) and used a no load or 500k-1meg volume pot you could kinda dial in the pickup you want if you happen to have 2 tone knobs. i think the stock configuration of the tbx wasn't very good but you can change the cap and resistor if you have the unique pot. a bill lawrence Q-filter is supposed to also pull down the resonant peak (in amplitude) but it's laid out as a notch filter so it retains more treble.

 

[JD0x0]

Yup been using this with quite a few guitars lately. Works really well with low inductance filtertrons to get PAF humbucker tones.
I've got 2.7nF on my TVJ Classic/Classic+

Most of my tone controls are now in the 2.2nF to 10nF range.

 

[AirCap]

the fender tbx control effectively changes the volume pot value in one half of the range and is a tone pot in the other. if you used a tbx control (or 2) and used a no load or 500k-1meg volume pot you could kinda dial in the pickup you want if you happen to have 2 tone knobs. i think the stock configuration of the tbx wasn't very good but you can change the cap and resistor if you have the unique pot. a bill lawrence Q-filter is supposed to also pull down the resonant peak (in amplitude) but it's laid out as a notch filter so it retains more treble.

Good stuff! I have used the Fender TBX for a long time now - it's affordable, and it works for guitar or bass. Nice mention on the Lawrence Q-filter, too - used to install a lot of those back in the day.