Capacitance Value For Neck & Bridge Tone Pots For Humbuckers?

DarthTangYang

DarthTangYang

New member
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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
 
SoPhx said:
Bridge humbucker kinda anemic? Try a .033 or .047 to bump up the low end.
Click to expand...

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?
 
DarthTangYang said:
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?
Click to expand...

Yeah...you don't lose any high end. Try it on a wimpy bridge pickup and get back to me.
 
SoPhx said:
Yeah...you don't lose any high end. Try it on a wimpy bridge pickup and get back to me.
Click to expand...

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?
 
DarthTangYang said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
Great. You have a JB in the bridge position. There are many pickup arrays with unbalanced bridge/neck volume. What I suggested was a cheap and easy way to beef up a bridge pu to balance better. It works very well. I use it on a R6 Goldtop with 50s pickups and the volume between pickups is well balanced now. Likewise, decreasing the tonecap value on the neck pickup to .015 would decrease the low end and clean it up a bit.
 
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SoPhx said:
Great. You have a JB in the bridge position. There are many pickup arrays with unbalanced bridge/neck volume. What I suggested was a cheap and easy way to beef up a bridge pu to balance better. It works very well. I use it on a R6 Goldtop with 50s pickups and the volume between pickups is well balanced now. Likewise, decreasing the tonecap value on the neck pickup to .015 would decrease the low end and clean it up a bit.
Click to expand...

The regular guitar tone circuit rolls off highs in a passive manner. You can't 'decrease low end' . . . you can only remove fewer highs. The low end will always be there in the same quantity.
 
GuitarStv said:
The regular guitar tone circuit rolls off highs in a passive manner. You can't 'decrease low end' . . . you can only remove fewer highs. The low end will always be there in the same quantity.
Click to expand...

Nope...the tone cap acts as a crossover to shelve low-end response. Works the same way as a coupling cap in an amp---bigger value=more lows. Try a .1 cap in a Strat (50s value) vs. the modern .022 value. Then you can delete your post.
 
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when the tone control is on 10, i dont hear a difference between tone cap values. i have a strat with a pp tone control to select a .047 cap or a .015 and i dont hear a difference. you can tell as soon as you start turning the knob for sure
 
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