EZ Mods: Guitar Tone Caps
As featured in “Andy’s Corner” on ProGuitarShop.com
We’re going to have a little discussion this week on a
simple mod anyone with a soldering iron and 5 minutes can perform on their guitar, the tone capacitor.
Now this topic has been beaten to death all over the
intrawebz and there is a lot of conflicting information,
opinions, and “facts” floating around out there that can
easily confuse those looking for some actual information. So I’m going to give you the lowdown from my
experience as a technician as well as some cool info
and shootouts that I found online. Hopefully this can
be a solid guideline for those of you wanting to experiment with some different aspects of your guitar.
First of all the capacitor (which shall henceforth be
known as “cap” for ease of typing) itself. What does it
do? The signal from the volume pot of the guitar is
connected to the tone pot as well. The tone cap is connected on one end to a lug of the tone pot and on the
other end to ground. This effectively acts as a low-pass
filter with the setting of the tone pot deciding how
much of the high frequency goes to ground (out of the
signal). The tone pot and cap are always in the guitar
signal so the pot value has some effect on tone as well.
A 250k pot tends to leak a tiny bit more high frequencies to ground than a 500k or 1M but has a more even
taper than the higher value pots. If you don’t want any
of the signal going through the tone pot, they make
Special ProGuitarShop Promotion
pots that are “no load” meaning that when set to 10,
the pot is completely bypassed and out of the signal.
If you doubt that the pot still affects the signal when
on 10, just check out the difference between posi-
tions 1 and 2 on an Esquire. Position 1 is the pickup
with the tone pot completely bypassed while posi-
tion 2 has the tone pot engaged. This is a great com-
parison of the effects of the tone pot on the signal.
Now that we know what the tone pot does, let’s talk
values. Capacitor values are measured in Farads but
the ones we use in our guitars are measured in very
small numbers called microfarads, the symbol for
which is µf. The two most commonly found values in
modern production guitars are 0.022µf and 0.047µf.
The higher the value of the cap, the more high frequencies it rolls off, therefore it’s common to find a
0.047µf cap on a guitar loaded with single coils and
a 0.022µf cap used in a guitar with humbuckers. Just
because this is the “industry standard” for off the shelf
guitars in no way means that this is the necessary
values that must be used with these pickups. Experiment! Enjoy! This stuff is fun! Depending on the style
of music you play, a higher or lower value may be exactly what you’re looking for. You’ll most likely want
to stay below 0.1µf though; anything above this will
pretty much give you mud. A 0.1µf cap will yield a very
warm, dark jazzy tone when the pot is rolled off. This
may be too dark for some but I’ve found my Tele-style
guitar loves this value with the tone pot set around 4
or 5 for jazz and mellow accompaniment. Your standard vintage Strat from the 50’s and perhaps the 60’s
as well, used a 0.05µf (now replaced by 0.047 mostly)
tone cap to tame the bright single coils. Again, some
people find this too dark and switch to a 0.022µf or
0.033µf. The 0.047µf will also produce warm, jazzy
tones with a bit more clarity than the very dark 0.1µf
while the 0.022µf and 0.033µf values will retain more
high end with a bit of (what I find to be very charming) nasal quality to it depending on the pickups. Your
standard LP type guitar with humbuckers will usually
be found with a 0.022µf cap that won’t kill all of the
highs from your humbuckers. This value is perfect
for getting that “woman tone” and I’ve found works
very well with any pickups that are overdriven, single coil or humbuckers. Feel free to experiment with
any value of cap under 0.1µf in your guitar. There is
