MOD GARAGE
DIRK wACKER
Tone Capacitors for Stratocasters, Part 2
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage.
Before I continue with the list of tone caps to
try in your Strat, I’d like to say a few words
about the popular Luxe repro caps (luxeradio.
com) that popped up on the market some
years ago. These are faithful recreations to
mimic the look of old vintage tone caps, and
these guys are really doing a great job. I had
some of them on the workbench and com-
pared them carefully with the original caps.
There is absolutely no difference in appear-
ance—they really look like 50-year-old caps,
and they even feel and smell like the old
ones. But keep in mind that they are replicas,
so they don’t sound just like the originals. If
you want the perfect vintage look inside your
electronics compartment, this is the way to
go. Don’t get me wrong, the people at Luxe
Radio & Musical Instrument Co. are doing
everything to get their caps to sound close
to the originals, so they are using the same
type of construction. For example, the Luxe
Bumblebee repro caps are vintage-masked,
new old stock (NOS), Vitamin Q-style paper-
in-oil caps from Russian military supply. These
caps sound very good, but not exactly like an
old “Bumblebee” or “Black Beauty.”
the absolute best-sounding caps for tone
circuits, tone stacks, and filters. A good
substitute for silver mica caps are the
Styroflex caps I mentioned last month.
They’re much smaller in size, and therefore
much easier to handle as a tone cap.
and they’re excellent quality—some are even
military graded—and they’re often cheaper
than caps from Jensen and others.
Paper-in-Oil (aka “PIO”)
These caps from Jensen, Sprague (Vitamin
Q), Mundorf, and some others can usually
be found in high-end hi-fi equipment like
audio power supplies, decoupling stages, and
speaker crossover filters, as well as high-quality guitar amps. They are very expensive, but
many swear by them. Naturally, you can use
them inside a guitar if you have enough space
for such a tone cap. These capacitors use oil-soaked paper as dielectric material and are
therefore well damped and very transparent,
smooth, defined, punchy, and natural sounding—bandwidth is very high and distortion
very low. The very early Sprague Bumblebee
caps from the ’50s are PIOs, and they’re easy
to identify because of the blob at one of the
leads. Plenty of NOS PIO caps are available,
Mullard/Philips C280 “Tropical Fish”
The Mullard/Philips C280 capacitor became
widely known as the “tropical fish” cap
because of its colorful stripes, which are
used to indicate its value. This cap is a polyester film type from the late ’60s, and you
can find it in a lot of tube amplifiers and
stompboxes from that era. It’s the magical
wah-wah cap as well, so this is your ticket
to converting your modern wah pedal into
a vintage tone machine. The “tropical fish”
term is often mixed up with the Bumblebee
caps, but this is simply wrong. These have
been out of production for decades but
are still available as NOS caps. They sound
excellent in a Strat, offering a very fat tone
that doesn’t turn into mud with overdrive or
distortion. Compared to the Orange Drop
polyester film caps, these have more midrange and less high-end sizzle. If you have a
thin-sounding Strat, they are worth a try.
OK, so let’s continue with the list of tone
caps you should try in your Strat.
Silver Mica
Silver mica caps are made from a dielectric
of mica with a silver dip coating, hence the
name. Modern silver mica caps are easy to
identify because they have a typical hump
in the middle of the body. NOS silver
mica caps usually have a flat, rectangular
shape. They can be found inside high-quality amps and stompboxes. They can
also be used as an excellent high-cut cap
on a guitar’s volume pot. If you can find
the correct value, they’re also excellent as
a cap for the tone control. Higher values
are often hard to find, big in size, and very
expensive—but worth a try. They really
sound excellent, without any coloration.
They’ll improve a guitar’s tone dramatically, and they’ll improve top end and clarity due to their low-loss design—they’re
