Tone Pot Frequency Question

[Chistopher]

Chistopher And is this because the more signal you send into the filter the more resistance there is?

The more resistance their is, the less signal goes through the filter. If you have a 500k tone control set to 10, their is 500k ohms of resistance blocking the signal from getting through the cap. A very small amount gets through, but not enough for us to hear. When you turn the tone control down, you have almost no resistance blocking the signal from getting into the cap. Then of course you have the secondary effects mentioned above that also play into things.

Counterintuitively, simple electronic circuits can be a little bit harder to understand the "big picture" aspect of, so it's often times best to take it on faith. It is very easy to understand what a tone control does by just playing around with values, but with all the little interactions you have with a passive system, it's hard to nail down the theory.