Re: Capacitors
A typical value for a Gibson would be something in the neighborhood of .022 uF (uF = microFarads, or 10-to-the-negative-6th power, if it helps you to think of it in scientific notation).
Fender used even more extreme tone caps: .047/.050 uF. But their pots were also half the value of Gibson's (in the old days; now both brands use approximately the same cap value).
Passive tone pots work by leaking treble out of the hot signal, in a controlled fashion, so it doesn't get heard in the end. This "leakage" goes to ground, which, tonally speaking, is the garbage can; that which goes to ground doesn't get heard.
To state it very simply: 1) The pot setting (i.e. where you place the pot shaft using the control knob) determines the amount of leakage. 2) The cap value determines which tones (frequencies) are leaked. 3) The greater the cap value, the lower the cutoff frequency gets - meaning that all else being equal, a .022 uF cap retains higher frequencies than does a .047 uF cap.
Stock Fender tone controls are actually quite dramatic, and I find them excessive. I generally use no higher than .022 uF caps in Fenders, and no higher than .01 uF caps in Gibsons. I even find that halving those values works great (meaning quartering the stock value). I do this if I want more of an aggressive cocked wah sound when I run the tone pot on 0, as opposed to a bassy, warm, muffled sound, like stock value, or, to a lesser degree, half stock value.
That being said, I find that stock cap values do indeed work better if you double the values of the pots, e.g. use 500 KOhm pots instead of 250 K, or use 1 MOhm (1,000K) pots instead of 500 K.
Personally, I would go straight for a .01 uF cap with 500 K pots.
