GUITAR ELECTRICS - CAPACITORS - WHY DO I CARE??

If you've opened up the back of a guitar before no doubt you have noticed those little tubes/discs attached to the back of your tone pots these little beauties do next to nothing when your tone controls are set at ten but as soon as you turn the tone knobs down your bringing them into play.

So what are they doing??

Well there's no need to get into high pass filters etc the basic principal is a capacitor bleeds off the higher frequencies (treble) from the signal to ground so the more you turn the tone knob down the more treble is bleed from the signal .

Well lets say your happy with your pickups overall but the neck/bridge is a bit bright?

This is where capacitors come into there own by changing the value of your capacitors you can fine tune the pickups to your liking neck pickup a bit bright well increase the value of the capacitor, want to add abit more definition to your mids, decrease the capacitor. simple


Common Capacitor Values
.005 mf Treble and bright flow though easily
.033 mf Cuts out a small amount of brights, has good mid range,
.047 mf Beefier sounding, lots of mids and bass , most electric guitars don't exceed this value
.100 mf Bass sounding, almost all brights are gone, used mostly in electric bass and active pickups

The above is just an example there are loads more values available

Capacitors are measured in both microfarad's and voltage both effect the tone and both react in different ways
traditionally the voltages have been between 200-400 volts though

If you're fealing brave, desolder the excisting capacitors and then use jumper leads attached to a new capacitor you can have a play and see what your ear likes as a dry run to find what you like they can be quite a cheap experiment often with surprising results you might hate it but you can put them back with relative ease

I found it useful buying a few cheap capacitors to experiment with as it helped narrow the field abit .
There are loads to choose from and everyone's got there favorite but this way you know the value (mf) that you want rather than going and buying some vintage originals only to be dissapointed because they were the wrong value.

For some reason they also can sound slightly different when they are switched end to end so have a play because its all about what you like!!!

WARNING

Being an idiot with a soldering iron inside a guitar can break things so when i say relative ease i mean it
its not rocket science just read up and get everything you need if you dont fancy it take it to a guitar tech