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Tone caps in Teles?

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OzziePete

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Was wondering what value tone capos folks put on the Teele bridge single coil pickup? I recently put a .022 cap on an old Tele bridge pickup and it is very ice picky, too much in fact...
I checked some wiring diagrams on the net & in some books and there's a lot of them with .047 caps...is that right? That's the same value as they put into humbuckers? :icon_scratch:
 
Whenever people ask this question, I usually suggest they try all the values they are questioning to find what works best for them.
Caps are DIRT CHEAP, and it only takes a few minutes to swap them out. Especially on a top-routed Tele. We can tell you all about how different frequency cutoff points are going to sound in a guitar, but it would be a lot more useful to try it for yourself and see what you, personally, prefer.

And FWIW, 0.047uF does sound a bit more appropriate for such a bright guitar. The frequency cutoff point of a 0.022uF cap is probably useless for any serious treble cutting.
 
I juts find it kinda odd that both for humbuckers and a trebly pickup like the Tele bridge, it seems that the cap that works best is the .047? I mean, a humbucker needs to be less muddied, while the Tele bridge needs some bass retained....


BTW, some caps ain't dirt cheap at all.

I got those Vitamin Q caps and they were serious $$ compared to the 'average garden variety' ceramic caps...Also those Sprague Orange Drops and the other 'collectible' caps cost a fortune, and I'm not buying that they are worth the difference in sound that you'll pay for them.

I bought the Vitamn Qs because I wanted to see if I could hear a difference in the oil paper filter cap, and while the humbucker with the Vitamin Q does sound good, I'm not sure that it is the cap that is causing that to sound so good - more like a bit of good luck with the pots and the quality of the pickup itself. And the cap that was on the Tele bridge pickup before all these renovations, was a dirt cheap ceramic cap (.047) and I had no issue with the quality of the tone I was getting.....but I needed to add the humbucker into the guitar and I went looking for diagrams and just equated a lower cap value for the Tele bridge like you automatically start thinking of a 250K pot for them...
 
Most people having been recommending .022's for humbuckers with a 500k pot and .047's for single coils with a 250k pot as long as I've been looking, since the 70's somewhere. The only humbucking pickups I've ever seen as coming with a .047 cap recommendation are the EMG HZ's, and Bill Lawrence will tell you you HAVE to try stuff also.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67371

There's a lot to learn - if you like the four-knob, Gibson setup as I do and I get with stacked pots, you need to be aware that when the switch is in the middle, ALL the pots and caps are involved in the tone production - both the blessing and curse of it, there's a huge range of tones to be found but it's hard to hit 'em quickly.

And, there's an entirely sensible school which asks, do you ever really use the lowest end of your tone control? If turning it to "zero" leaves you with an unusable tone, you should try a smaller cap like a .015 (or lower) just so your tone control can ACCOMPLISH things that sound good. I keep .047s, .033's, .022's and .015's around as a matter of course and I'm not shy about ripping her open. The idea that there is a "perfect" solution, and that if you just read a lot, you're likely to hit that solution the very first time.... well, I wish you luck! :hello2:

And, I personally just don't believe that expensive caps are anything other than placebos. NO TONE GOES THROUGH THE CAPS.... they subtract elements from the signal, and if there really is any variant at all, it would surely be randomized among caps, with NO CORRELATION between cost and tone. And, I have never, ever, ever seen anyone do the test for tone that you would have to do, which is record the guitar with one cap, change it and record it with the other, then play the tapes for a group of listeners who didn't know which was which. This is a real easy thing to do - the fact is, people can sell $10 caps all day long without ever doing a single goddam thing to prove their assertions, so why should they even bother to test it? I wouldn't either, if I was an amoral scam artist.

If you can't hear the difference, you don't DESERVE to own one.....

heaven hep us all. :icon_scratch:
 
stubhead said:
Most people having been recommending .022's for humbuckers and .047 for single coils as long as I've been looking, since the 70's somewhere. The only humbucking pickups I've ever seen as coming with a .047 cap recommendation are the EMG HZ's, and Bill Lawrence will tell you you HAVE to try stuff also.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67371

There's a lot to learn - if you like the four-knob, Gibson setup as I do and I get with stacked pots, you need to be aware that when the switch is in the middle, ALL the pots and caps are involved in the tone production - both the blessing and curse of it, there's a huge range of tones to be found but it's hard to hit 'em quickly.

And, there's an entirely sensible school which asks, do you ever really use the lowest end of your tone control? If turning it to "zero" leaves you with an unusable tone, you should try a smaller cap like a .015 (or lower) just so your tone control can ACCOMPLISH things that sound good. I keep .047s, .033's, .022's and .015's around as a matter of course and I'm not shy about ripping her open. The idea that there is a "perfect" solution, and that if you just read a lot, you're likely to hit that solution the very first time.... well, I wish you luck! :hello2:
Click to expand...

I must've got the advice ass-about, as I was going with .047s for the humbucker and .022s for the Tele bridge... :doh:

I am kinda hit & miss with my soldering (tho I am getting better, lol) and I have two concentric pots (250/500) that are expensive. I didn't want to burn these things by soldering and re-soldering in numerous caps to see how they sounded. I am pretty happy with the way the humbucker sounds with the .047. It's in the neck position and threatening to completely over power the softer Tele pickup in the bridge...so to have the humbucker sounding a bit more treblier works in this guitar set up. Like you, I have accumulated a few spares of things over the years, and I still have the original .047 ceramic cap to use as well. I also have a spare .033 Vitamin Q to use if I want to try that - but it still might be too trebly with that... I'll try the .047 first...
 
I like to use the .047 on the teles. I also like a .001 across the volume as a treble bleed. To my ears this works great. A .033 is not a bad value for certain bridge models. For caps I like the Mallory axial type.

This is certainly can be one of "those" topics, but all that really matters is does it sound good. I've never heard someone in the back of the bar stand up and criticize someones choice of caps. :laughing7:
 
I think I read this in Dan Erlewine's column, or somewhere.... if you want to get serious about the experimenting, buy up a pile of cheap caps of different values and attach them to a little card with their feet sticking out - a little square card would have four caps. Then attach mini-alligator clips to the appropriate pickup and pot wires, and take your time working through the different caps, trying different amp settings, knob settings and all.

Most manufacturers nowadays of amps, guitars, speakers, cords, stompboxes etc. are all trying to hid the "middle ground" between treble and bass, too distorted, not distorted enough. This kind of obviates the fact that a very bright guitar through a bassy amp is going to act way different than a very bassy guitar through a bright amp & speaker setup... I remember reading years back that Jeff Beck turns the treble and volume on his (customized) Marshall JCM2000 ALL THE WAY UP - the bass and midrange are off - then he turns tone and volume on his Strat all the way down. And that's his starting point, when he come out on stage. That original rich ringing tone that Duane Allman and Carlos Santana had was a result of turning a fully dimed-out tube amp into hi-fi PA speakers, not nasty rock speakers.... this stuff takes a long time to learn. I do believe that an awful lot of the development came about in the 60's and 70's when musicians were forced to play through whatever was there, whatever they could afford, and the "happy accidents" pushed the standard. Just dick with it, that's all.
 
stubhead said:
I think I read this in Dan Erlewine's column, or somewhere.... if you want to get serious about the experimenting, buy up a pile of cheap caps of different values and attach them to a little card with their feet sticking out - a little square card would have four caps. Then attach mini-alligator clips to the appropriate pickup and pot wires, and take your time working through the different caps, trying different amp settings, knob settings and all.

Most manufacturers nowadays of amps, guitars, speakers, cords, stompboxes etc. are all trying to hid the "middle ground" between treble and bass, too distorted, not distorted enough. This kind of obviates the fact that a very bright guitar through a bassy amp is going to act way different than a very bassy guitar through a bright amp & speaker setup... I remember reading years back that Jeff Beck turns the treble and volume on his (customized) Marshall JCM2000 ALL THE WAY UP - the bass and midrange are off - then he turns tone and volume on his Strat all the way down. And that's his starting point, when he come out on stage. That original rich ringing tone that Duane Allman and Carlos Santana had was a result of turning a fully dimed-out tube amp into hi-fi PA speakers, not nasty rock speakers.... this stuff takes a long time to learn. I do believe that an awful lot of the development came about in the 60's and 70's when musicians were forced to play through whatever was there, whatever they could afford, and the "happy accidents" pushed the standard. Just dick with it, that's all.
Click to expand...

There's a guy on You Tube who has done the cardboard cut out thing with his Epiphone semi acoustic to show the changes of pots and caps, a series of vids.......Most of the time you can hear the changes but sometimes, because of the YT compression I guess,  it's not so noticeable. A lot of the .047 vs .022 or .033 is very small in detail, barely noticeable to someone just hearing the guitar for the first time. The treble bleed cap is a very good mod too......He's also included a graphic display which helps you see the frequency responses. The .022 cap comparison he does here, highlights how similar all types of caps (of a same value) react to the signal.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92G-jw4TqS4[/youtube]



 
OzziePete said:
I juts find it kinda odd that both for humbuckers and a trebly pickup like the Tele bridge, it seems that the cap that works best is the .047? I mean, a humbucker needs to be less muddied, while the Tele bridge needs some bass retained....


BTW, some caps ain't dirt cheap at all.

I got those Vitamin Q caps and they were serious $$ compared to the 'average garden variety' ceramic caps...Also those Sprague Orange Drops and the other 'collectible' caps cost a fortune, and I'm not buying that they are worth the difference in sound that you'll pay for them.

I bought the Vitamn Qs because I wanted to see if I could hear a difference in the oil paper filter cap, and while the humbucker with the Vitamin Q does sound good, I'm not sure that it is the cap that is causing that to sound so good - more like a bit of good luck with the pots and the quality of the pickup itself. And the cap that was on the Tele bridge pickup before all these renovations, was a dirt cheap ceramic cap (.047) and I had no issue with the quality of the tone I was getting.....but I needed to add the humbucker into the guitar and I went looking for diagrams and just equated a lower cap value for the Tele bridge like you automatically start thinking of a 250K pot for them...
Click to expand...

Why is it odd?
On basses, the standard value for a high impedance signal is 0.047uF, regardless of the type of pickups used.

And FWIW, a capacitor in a LPF application should have no effect on the bass range. Capacitors block DC and low frequencies, and since the cap runs parallel to the signal, save for leakage resistance, the low frequency portion of your signal, below the cutoff point is unaffected.

As far as the paper in oil debate goes, I don't know how this forum as a whole feels, but there are two sides to the debate. On the one hand are the golden ears that swear there is a difference, then there are those (Such as myself.) that believe that for an application involving a few Volts maximum at a few microAmperes current, as a LPF, the composition of a capacitor means nothing.

I think the main problem is that people upgrade from ceramic caps, and suddenly hear a big difference, and then attribute that difference to the composition of the capacitor.
Lower quality capacitors, such as ceramics are notorious for having very poor tolerances. Some are as bad as -20%/+80%, which means the actual capacitance can stray from the rating by as much as 20% below or 80% above. Most other compositions have much tighter tolerances.
The other issue is that ceramics, by nature, have a high leakage resistance, while other types of caps usually do not.

Get yourself a decent film cap and it will sound just as good as those ridiculously overpriced caps that so many people are suckered into buying.

 
I'm running 0.022 uf caps in my teles.  for me they work fine, but I always have the tone dialed back a bit.

... and when I want to cut someones head off, I just turn that little knob  :headbang:
 
I think the two tone knobs on my strat are there because it would look vacant with only one knob.  I'm highly doubting I'll bother to wire them up next build I do... or make something interesting in their places.
 
line6man said:
As far as the paper in oil debate goes, I don't know how this forum as a whole feels, but there are two sides to the debate. On the one hand are the golden ears that swear there is a difference, then there are those (Such as myself.) that believe that for an application involving a few Volts maximum at a few microAmperes current, as a LPF, the composition of a capacitor means nothing.

I think the main problem is that people upgrade from ceramic caps, and suddenly hear a big difference, and then attribute that difference to the composition of the capacitor.
Lower quality capacitors, such as ceramics are notorious for having very poor tolerances. Some are as bad as -20%/+80%, which means the actual capacitance can stray from the rating by as much as 20% below or 80% above. Most other compositions have much tighter tolerances.
The other issue is that ceramics, by nature, have a high leakage resistance, while other types of caps usually do not.

Get yourself a decent film cap and it will sound just as good as those ridiculously overpriced caps that so many people are suckered into buying.
Click to expand...

Absolutely correct. Some people wil even cite leakage resistance, lead resistance, lead inductance, etc. as having an effect. That may be true if you're designing cell phones or radar transceivers that operate in the gigahertz range, but in audio equipment where you're at the low and sub-kilohertz range? Fuhgeddaboudit.

As for the YouTube video where the guy is testing various types of caps to see what the difference in "tone" is? He never even measures any of them. He has no idea what the capacitances are that he's working with, beyond what it says on the label. Fact is, you could buy a bag of 100 .022mf orange drops and not be able to find two the same. You're certainly not going to get two the same across types and manufacturers, especially from such a small sample set.
 
I've been measuring pots now for several years, and it's pretty dark out there, Mommy...  :o :o :o The CTS pots seem to run about 180 to 250K for the ones marked "250" and the "500's" run from 400 to 500K. I'm just not going to order up a run of custom $50 pots from those German guys (I forget who) so I just gave up buying 250's a while back. There's a neat trick of using a 750K resistor across the outside lugs of a pot, as described here:

http://www.projectguitar.com/tut/potm.htm

It drops a 500 to 300, and drops the real 440's (or so) right down to 250K! Yay. And, furthermore: capacitors are additive in parallel, which means: If you really can't figure up the tone components on a guitar, in other words, a wood combination that's new to you, or some bright "hi-fi" pickups like Lawrences, Laces, Alumitones, EMG HZ's..... anytime you go off the reservation, you might as well just wire it up with 500K pots, .022 or even .015 caps, but leave yourself ROOM to either bridge a 750K resistor or add a second capacitor on top of the first one - or even both. Both of these additives will tame a shrieker or adjust the sweep of the pot... when I wired up Gleamo the Aluminum WonderTele I wanted it to sound like a metal guitar, but boy was I ever happy to be able to drop the pot and adjust the drift of the thing down boy, down... down! perhaps once you find out what's happening you might want to clean it up with a pristine rewire, but you can also just snip off the extra resistors and caps if you go too far.

S6300138.jpg


And of course you can wire a .015 and a .033 cap to a three-way switch so the pot sweeps the .015, the .033 or both added as .048. Yay. You're never going know what it sounds like TO YOU just because somebody writes about it on the internets. Hey, how about this!:

http://www.diyguitarmods.com/custom-varitone-wiring.php

You can buy these too: http://www.stellartone.com/
 
Cagey said:
Absolutely correct. Some people wil even cite leakage resistance, lead resistance, lead inductance, etc. as having an effect. That may be true if you're designing cell phones or radar transceivers that operate in the gigahertz range, but in audio equipment where you're at the low and sub-kilohertz range? Fuhgeddaboudit.

As for the YouTube video where the guy is testing various types of caps to see what the difference in "tone" is? He never even measures any of them. He has no idea what the capacitances are that he's working with, beyond what it says on the label. Fact is, you could buy a bag of 100 .022mf orange drops and not be able to find two the same. You're certainly not going to get two the same across types and manufacturers, especially from such a small sample set.
Click to expand...

And of course it's not really all that difficult to put a guitar-level signal through a bunch of caps and actually measure the distortion, or rolloff, or whatever...
 
Cagey said:
line6man said:
As far as the paper in oil debate goes, I don't know how this forum as a whole feels, but there are two sides to the debate. On the one hand are the golden ears that swear there is a difference, then there are those (Such as myself.) that believe that for an application involving a few Volts maximum at a few microAmperes current, as a LPF, the composition of a capacitor means nothing.

I think the main problem is that people upgrade from ceramic caps, and suddenly hear a big difference, and then attribute that difference to the composition of the capacitor.
Lower quality capacitors, such as ceramics are notorious for having very poor tolerances. Some are as bad as -20%/+80%, which means the actual capacitance can stray from the rating by as much as 20% below or 80% above. Most other compositions have much tighter tolerances.
The other issue is that ceramics, by nature, have a high leakage resistance, while other types of caps usually do not.

Get yourself a decent film cap and it will sound just as good as those ridiculously overpriced caps that so many people are suckered into buying.
Click to expand...

Absolutely correct. Some people wil even cite leakage resistance, lead resistance, lead inductance, etc. as having an effect. That may be true if you're designing cell phones or radar transceivers that operate in the gigahertz range, but in audio equipment where you're at the low and sub-kilohertz range? Fuhgeddaboudit.

As for the YouTube video where the guy is testing various types of caps to see what the difference in "tone" is? He never even measures any of them. He has no idea what the capacitances are that he's working with, beyond what it says on the label. Fact is, you could buy a bag of 100 .022mf orange drops and not be able to find two the same. You're certainly not going to get two the same across types and manufacturers, especially from such a small sample set.
Click to expand...

You've actually seen people cite ESR and ESL as something they should even give a shit about at all? That's a new level of stupidity.  :tard:
 
drewfx said:
And of course it's not really all that difficult to put a guitar-level signal through a bunch of caps and actually measure the distortion, or rolloff, or whatever...
Click to expand...

Yeah, but you really wouldn't want to confuse the issue with facts. You'd get laughed off of many musician's forums <grin>
 
stubhead said:
I've been measuring pots now for several years, and it's pretty dark out there, Mommy...  :o :o :o The CTS pots seem to run about 180 to 250K for the ones marked "250" and the "500's" run from 400 to 500K. I'm just not going to order up a run of custom $50 pots from those German guys (I forget who) so I just gave up buying 250's a while back. There's a neat trick of using a 750K resistor across the outside lugs of a pot, as described here:

http://www.projectguitar.com/tut/potm.htm

It drops a 500 to 300, and drops the real 440's (or so) right down to 250K! Yay. And, furthermore: capacitors are additive in parallel, which means: If you really can't figure up the tone components on a guitar, in other words, a wood combination that's new to you, or some bright "hi-fi" pickups like Lawrences, Laces, Alumitones, EMG HZ's..... anytime you go off the reservation, you might as well just wire it up with 500K pots, .022 or even .015 caps, but leave yourself ROOM to either bridge a 750K resistor or add a second capacitor on top of the first one - or even both. Both of these additives will tame a shrieker or adjust the sweep of the pot... when I wired up Gleamo the Aluminum WonderTele I wanted it to sound like a metal guitar, but boy was I ever happy to be able to drop the pot and adjust the drift of the thing down boy, down... down! perhaps once you find out what's happening you might want to clean it up with a pristine rewire, but you can also just snip off the extra resistors and caps if you go too far.

S6300138.jpg


And of course you can wire a .015 and a .033 cap to a three-way switch so the pot sweeps the .015, the .033 or both added as .048. Yay. You're never going know what it sounds like TO YOU just because somebody writes about it on the internets. Hey, how about this!:

http://www.diyguitarmods.com/custom-varitone-wiring.php

You can buy these too: http://www.stellartone.com/
Click to expand...

If you want to get into series and parallel combos of caps and resistors, it is useful to remember the following formulas:

Series resistance RTotal= R1+R2+...Rn
Parallel resistance RTotal= 1/([1/R1]+[1/R2]+...{1/Rn])
Series capacitance CTotal= 1/([1/C1]+[1/C2]+...[1/Cn])
Parallel capacitance CTotal= C1+C2+...Cn
 
 
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