Can you dumb this down a bit please?
Sorry, there was a good one liner above that I thought took care of that:
The higher the cap value the darker the tone!...In the simplest terms!
Reading that back I see some people still have questions
When you say "darker" do you mean less treble and more bass?
So first things first, any passive tone circuit is cut only. There will never be more anything (except in relative terms, which may have been the meaning here, but so we're clear).
To rephrase the ..'darker...' line: : bigger cap cuts more of the spectrum.
What this means is that (see my previous post) the point at which the high end rolloff starts drifts downwards as you raise the cap value. The amount or rate of rolloff remains constant (assuming the tone pot doesn't move ), but as an example, a cap value of A would give you a rolloff that started at XHz, was -6db down at 2*X Hz and 12 db down at 4*XHz. A value of 2*A would start at 1/2*X, be 6 db down at X, , 12 at 2*X and 18 at 4*X . That's assuming max cut on the tone knob.
So, the value of the cap determines whether or not you roll-off just the very top end (shrill) in basic terms.
Yes, but that value would likely be smaller than 0.022uF for most pickups. Super small values are good for such utilitarian tone control - removing shrillness or excessive icepick type top end from the sound, as well as taming hiss or noise but will not do very much noticable on low to moderate settings because it's licking (random example pulled out of my anus) 2 db off 10kHz (there's not much up above that besides 'air'). Lower than that (cap value) point (depends on the pups; can't give you a universal value) will make it more musically useful because milder settings will make a noticable change. There's a balance to be struck, and to a point it depends on personal taste and what you use the tone knob for (noise control is valid if you like the pups pretty much full on otherwise), where the max cut is not too crazy dark/muddy but the bottom of the range is still useful.
