hey all
i have a tokai es 335 copy with only 1 vol and 1 tone and a 3 way switch. i'm replacing the stock gotoh pickups with some handwound highorder pickups. my question is i have some wiring diagrams showing a .047 cap on the tone pot and another diagram showing .022. what is the difference in sound and what do these caps do? anyone have any recommendations?
You likely won't hear a super big difference but there will be some.
Capacitors pass high frequencies better than lower ones. You can think of them as AC signal voltage resistors that have a sliding value. At very high frequencies they have a very low resistance value. As you slide down in frequency the "resistance" value will go up. At low bass frequencies that tone cap is a BIG "resistor".
With AC voltage like a signal, capacitors and inductors show this property which is called "reactance", or AC resistance if you like.
Tone controls in amps and guitars take advantage of reactance to allow you to adjust the tone of the device. In your guitar they hang a cap from the signal line to ground. The cap will leak treble to ground but lower notes will be less affected so it will sound like the treble has been reduced. The tone pot is just a real resistance in series with the tone cap so you can adjust how deep the tone cut will be.
The value of the cap determines the midpoint of that sliding reactance range. This means the action will start happening at a different point.
Think of a graphic EQ with sliders. You're feeding it with a full range signal, like classical music or Moody Blues where you have everything from the lowest bass to the highest tweets. You leave the first few slider cuts alone but once you get into the midrange you start to pull the sliders down, each one a bit more than the last until the final two sliders are at the very bottom.
This is what its like putting a tone cap into your guitar! If the above example was a model of a .02 mfd cap then if you changed it to a bigger value like .047 then it would be like shifting that curve of slider pots down a slider or two, so that the cut started happening earlier and killed treble even faster.
The tone pot would act like changing how deep the sliders would be cut. Still the same curve but the cuts would not be as deep.
So the short answer is that a larger value tone cap would cut the treble earlier and deeper.
Which one should you go with? Try 'em both and go with what you like! If you want to stay stock you might look to see if when they changed the cap value they also changed the resistance value of the tone control. The two parts work together. If you see that the .02 cap goes with a 250k pot and the .047 cap uses a 500k then you might want to stay consistent.
Hope this helps!
:food-smiley-004: