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Capacitance Value For Neck & Bridge Tone Pots For Humbuckers?

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  • Capacitance Value For Neck & Bridge Tone Pots For Humbuckers?

    I have an Epiphone Les Paul with a Seymour Duncan SH-4 in the bridge position and a 59 in the neck position. I have ordered 4 new CTS 550k pots (450 series, ±9% tolerance) that I plan to put into the guitar. I read somewhere that some people use 0.022µF on the bridge tone pot and 0.015µF on the neck pot for humbuckers, while I myself have always used 0.022µF on both tone pots for humbuckers.

    Does anyone here have any experience with using a 0.015µF on the neck and if so, how much of a difference does it make?

  • #2
    Minor.
    But sometimes worth it for certain guitars.
    You can keep going too. Go for a .01 or a .001 if you want bright and very little rolloff of tone.

    I've done this as to me the neck tone even without a tone circuit attached is still mellow enough.

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    • #3
      They cost so little, get the .022, .015, .010, etc. to experiment with. May as well go bigger too. It’ll change the roll off frequency that the tone control affects. By going smaller (higher frequency) a lot of t he time you can roll off further and not have it sound so muddy.
      Oh no.....


      Oh Yeah!

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      • #4
        I personally used to always go .022 in both positions as well, but switched to .015 in the neck several years ago. I do like the slightly less roll off I get with the tone knob. I still have one guitar that has a .022 in the neck, and I can tell the diff when I start to roll the neck back. FWIW, I always splurge for the PIO caps, Russian. I don’t spend on NOS stuff, but I like the Paper In Oil.
        Play more guitar.

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        • #5
          The range I use are 22nf, 18, 15, 10, 6.8, and 3. 22 and 18 are as bassy as I need. 15, 10, and 6.8 are creamy. And 3nf rolls off very little, sounds almost the same as turning down the volume.
          The things that you wanted
          I bought them for you

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          • #6
            Stacking two 22s in parallel makes an 11

            Put two 22s in series and make a 44

            You can experiment with values to get what ever you want
            EHD
            Just here surfing Guitar Pron
            RG2EX1 w/ SD hot-rodded pickups / RG4EXFM1 w/ Carvin S22j/b + FVN middle
            SR500 / Martin 000CE-1/Epiphone Hummingbird
            Epiphone Florentine with OEM Probuckers
            Ehdwuld branded Blue semi hollow custom with JB/Jazz
            Reptile Green Gibson Custom Studio / Aqua Dean Shire semi hollow with piezo
            Carvin Belair / Laney GC80A Acoustic Amp (a gift from Guitar Player Mag)
            GNX3000 (yea I'm a modeler)

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            • #7
              Bridge humbucker kinda anemic? Try a .033 or .047 to bump up the low end.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by SoPhx View Post
                Bridge humbucker kinda anemic? Try a .033 or .047 to bump up the low end.
                That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. Since humbuckers has a darker sound then single coil most people tend to want to brighten them for a bit more tone. 0.022µF seem to be the standard value when it comes to humbuckers, at least for the bridge pickup, and if anything - even a slightly lower value in the neck position since it will be even darker than the bridge pickup.

                Single coil people on the other hand seem to use higher value on the capacitors, around 0.047µF or even higher due to the pickups being too bright. Obviously this is all personal preference and I'm not a fan of single coil myself so I've never developed a personal preference regarding them.

                I managed to find 0.015µF Orange Drops with a ±1% tolerance and have ordered one to see if I can get my 59 to sound a bit brighter. I just don't want it to be as bright as my SH-4 (bridge).

                I've also seen some people turn their neck pickups around for some reason. Adam Jones (Tool) have done this on his LP Silverburst. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Does it make any difference at all for the sound?

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by DarthTangYang View Post

                  That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. Since humbuckers has a darker sound then single coil most people tend to want to brighten them for a bit more tone. 0.022µF seem to be the standard value when it comes to humbuckers, at least for the bridge pickup, and if anything - even a slightly lower value in the neck position since it will be even darker than the bridge pickup.

                  Single coil people on the other hand seem to use higher value on the capacitors, around 0.047µF or even higher due to the pickups being too bright. Obviously this is all personal preference and I'm not a fan of single coil myself so I've never developed a personal preference regarding them.

                  I managed to find 0.015µF Orange Drops with a ±1% tolerance and have ordered one to see if I can get my 59 to sound a bit brighter. I just don't want it to be as bright as my SH-4 (bridge).

                  I've also seen some people turn their neck pickups around for some reason. Adam Jones (Tool) have done this on his LP Silverburst. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Does it make any difference at all for the sound?
                  Yeah...you don't lose any high end. Try it on a wimpy bridge pickup and get back to me.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by SoPhx View Post

                    Yeah...you don't lose any high end. Try it on a wimpy bridge pickup and get back to me.
                    Not sure what you mean... Try reversing a bridge pickup or put in a 0.047µF cap on a bridge tone pot?

                    Either way, I have no interest in either since my bridge pickup definitely isn't "wimpy". It's a JB Model (SH-4) without a cover and it sounds just delicious. What I'm talking about is the neck pickup. My experience is that neck pickups always tend to sound a bit muddy and for this reason I've never really used them that much. This is the first time I try lowering the value of the cap. Hopefully the 0.015µF will do the trick without sounding too bright. I wouldn't want it to sound too much like my bridge.

                    Reversing the pickup is another possible step but I'm a bit skeptical of just how effective this really is. Would moving the polepieces a centimeter or so closer to the bridge really have a noticable effect on the tone? Raising the pickup while lowering the polepieces, or lowering the pickup while raising the polepieces makes perfect sense why it would have an effect, but to just move them slightly towards the bridge seems a bit far-fetched to me.
                    Have anyone here tried this and heard any noticable effect on the tone?

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Dang so many words
                      EHD
                      Just here surfing Guitar Pron
                      RG2EX1 w/ SD hot-rodded pickups / RG4EXFM1 w/ Carvin S22j/b + FVN middle
                      SR500 / Martin 000CE-1/Epiphone Hummingbird
                      Epiphone Florentine with OEM Probuckers
                      Ehdwuld branded Blue semi hollow custom with JB/Jazz
                      Reptile Green Gibson Custom Studio / Aqua Dean Shire semi hollow with piezo
                      Carvin Belair / Laney GC80A Acoustic Amp (a gift from Guitar Player Mag)
                      GNX3000 (yea I'm a modeler)

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by ehdwuld View Post
                        Dang so many words
                        Yeah, you kinda' need those for communication

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by DarthTangYang View Post

                          That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me. Since humbuckers has a darker sound then single coil most people tend to want to brighten them for a bit more tone. 0.022µF seem to be the standard value when it comes to humbuckers, at least for the bridge pickup, and if anything - even a slightly lower value in the neck position since it will be even darker than the bridge pickup.

                          Single coil people on the other hand seem to use higher value on the capacitors, around 0.047µF or even higher due to the pickups being too bright. Obviously this is all personal preference and I'm not a fan of single coil myself so I've never developed a personal preference regarding them.

                          I managed to find 0.015µF Orange Drops with a ±1% tolerance and have ordered one to see if I can get my 59 to sound a bit brighter. I just don't want it to be as bright as my SH-4 (bridge).

                          I've also seen some people turn their neck pickups around for some reason. Adam Jones (Tool) have done this on his LP Silverburst. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Does it make any difference at all for the sound?
                          Personally, I like to use a .022 or .033 cap on the neck and 0.022 or .015 on the bridge for both single coils and for humbuckers. A small cap on the neck will slightly brighten the pickup up with tone at max, but will be much less useful for tone shaping (not much difference between full and off). A small cap on the bridge will make the bridge a bit brighter at max on the tone pot, but is more usable because you'll find that it has a more usable range all the way from 1 - 10. When the bridge cap is too big it gets unusably muddy after only knocking the tone back 1 or 2 notches.

                          The type of capacitor you use makes no difference at all, and has been proven many times by running frequency analysis of the signal. Ceramic, paper, film, whatevs. Just get what's cheapest. The value of a capacitor is important (measured value, not the value it's supposed to be) because this sets your cut-off where the cap starts to impact the sound of something (even with the pot at max).

                          Some humbuckers with mis-matched coils (A lot of Dimarzios are like this - Tone Zone, Evo, etc.) will sound different when flipped upside down than in their tradiitonal position because you're changing where the stronger coil is physically located. If the pickup has identical coils the difference made by flipping it around will be very minimal.
                          Join me in the fight against muscular atrophy!

                          Originally posted by Douglas Adams
                          This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by ehdwuld View Post
                            Stacking two 22s in parallel makes an 11

                            Put two 22s in series and make a 44

                            You can experiment with values to get what ever you want
                            Capacitors work the opposite of resistors.

                            2X .022s in parallel is .044
                            2X .022s in series is .011

                            If you want to mix in other values here is a quick calculator - https://www.digikey.com/en/resources...llel-capacitor

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              I thought I did that backwards
                              thanks
                              EHD
                              Just here surfing Guitar Pron
                              RG2EX1 w/ SD hot-rodded pickups / RG4EXFM1 w/ Carvin S22j/b + FVN middle
                              SR500 / Martin 000CE-1/Epiphone Hummingbird
                              Epiphone Florentine with OEM Probuckers
                              Ehdwuld branded Blue semi hollow custom with JB/Jazz
                              Reptile Green Gibson Custom Studio / Aqua Dean Shire semi hollow with piezo
                              Carvin Belair / Laney GC80A Acoustic Amp (a gift from Guitar Player Mag)
                              GNX3000 (yea I'm a modeler)

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