Your Guitar’s tone circuit uses a Potentiometer and a Capacitor to dull your guitar’s sound but did you know this is tuneable? You can drastically change the way your guitar sounds overall by tweaking these two interchangeable components. Whats more is the value of these parts also influences the sound of your guitar even if the controls are turned up to 10!
The general rule of thumb is; the higher the value (in MicroFarads µF), the darker sounding the circuit will be perceived
Higher Value Capacitor = Darker
Lower Value Capacitor = Brighter
- .01µF (Brightest)
- .022µF
- .033µF
- .047µF
- .068µF
- .1µF (Darkest)
Suggested Tone Cap Values:
Single coil guitars .047µF
due to the jangly nature of singlecoils a higher value capacitor will tame the trebles nicely
Humbucking guitars .022µF
Due to the muddier nature of double coil humbuckers a lower value capacitor will not take too much more treble off
Bass guitars .068µF
Basses need a decent low frequency roll off and a .068µF will give a nice deep range
Nerd Talk:
The guitars traditional tone circuit is technically a low pass filter, in which a portion of the guitar’s signal (as dictated by the tone pot) is attenuated to ground through a capacitor – the value of the capacitor dictating the frequency.
