Liko
New member
Before I spend a weekend wiring this up, I wanted to see if anyone else had tried it. Probably not a new idea.
The basic premise is that instead of neck and bridge (or neck and mid) tone on a Strat, I'd instead use one of the pots as the tone control, and the second as the tone cap selector:
Before we get too far, I know that these rotary switches exist, and would give me quite a few straightforward options for capacitance values. I want to see if this will work first, because if it will then I can use DPDT pots and have other switching options (AFAIK there is no combination of a rotary switch with a secondary push-pull DPDT).
On the surface this looks like it'd do the trick to switch between .022uF and .047uF tone caps (the higher capacitance pushes the resonant peak of the circuit lower). Whichever cap the wiper was tuned to would have negligible resistance and thus the amount of signal taking the path to the opposite lug across 1Mohm resistance would be minimal.
Things get interesting when the wiper is anywhere between them. Assuming the 1M pot is linear, with the "blend" at the middle position, the resistance to either cap is 500K. Capacitance in parallel adds, while resistance in parallel is the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals, so the circuit would be as if I had 250K extra resistance in the tone pot and a .069uF cap. I can't really wrap my head around how that would sound except that the resonant peak frequency would be lower than either tone cap soloed, and the peak level would be higher, so as I swept through the tone blend the tone would get more middy.
I could probably play with this behavior by making the tone adjuster 250k ohms and using a .022 and .033 cap; in the middle position, total resistance at max tone would be 500k and the effective cap value would be 0.055uF which is close to a stock Gibson 0.047uF cap, effectively giving me 22, 33 and 55 pF cap values and total impedances varying between stock Strat and stock Gibson tone circuits.
So, the question; has anyone tried this? How well does it actually work? I'm thinking about this for a swiss-army type build that does a little of everything, so varying tone caps could be useful, but if the best way to do it is a rotary switch, I lose other options I want more unless I start drilling more holes and adding more switches, and if I'm doing that I'd rather just have the new switch choose tone caps (the two values I'd want to switch between are 22pF and 47pF, so just put those on either end of an on-on SPDT and I'm done).
The basic premise is that instead of neck and bridge (or neck and mid) tone on a Strat, I'd instead use one of the pots as the tone control, and the second as the tone cap selector:
Before we get too far, I know that these rotary switches exist, and would give me quite a few straightforward options for capacitance values. I want to see if this will work first, because if it will then I can use DPDT pots and have other switching options (AFAIK there is no combination of a rotary switch with a secondary push-pull DPDT).
On the surface this looks like it'd do the trick to switch between .022uF and .047uF tone caps (the higher capacitance pushes the resonant peak of the circuit lower). Whichever cap the wiper was tuned to would have negligible resistance and thus the amount of signal taking the path to the opposite lug across 1Mohm resistance would be minimal.
Things get interesting when the wiper is anywhere between them. Assuming the 1M pot is linear, with the "blend" at the middle position, the resistance to either cap is 500K. Capacitance in parallel adds, while resistance in parallel is the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals, so the circuit would be as if I had 250K extra resistance in the tone pot and a .069uF cap. I can't really wrap my head around how that would sound except that the resonant peak frequency would be lower than either tone cap soloed, and the peak level would be higher, so as I swept through the tone blend the tone would get more middy.
I could probably play with this behavior by making the tone adjuster 250k ohms and using a .022 and .033 cap; in the middle position, total resistance at max tone would be 500k and the effective cap value would be 0.055uF which is close to a stock Gibson 0.047uF cap, effectively giving me 22, 33 and 55 pF cap values and total impedances varying between stock Strat and stock Gibson tone circuits.
So, the question; has anyone tried this? How well does it actually work? I'm thinking about this for a swiss-army type build that does a little of everything, so varying tone caps could be useful, but if the best way to do it is a rotary switch, I lose other options I want more unless I start drilling more holes and adding more switches, and if I'm doing that I'd rather just have the new switch choose tone caps (the two values I'd want to switch between are 22pF and 47pF, so just put those on either end of an on-on SPDT and I'm done).
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