How a Guitar Tone Potentiometer Works?

A common guitar tone control is a low-pass filter. It's made from pickup resistance and tone capacitor capacitance. It's called also a RC filter.

A tone pot in a guitar is used as a variable resistor (only two lugs are used). It's placed after or before the tone cap. The more resistance is on this path, the smaller amount of treble will bleed out to the ground. The diagram shows how it work's in three different knob positions:

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Treble Bleed Mod

In this post, I would like to present my way to make a good guitar treble bleed mod (treble bleed prevention). If you were searching on-line about this circuit, you probably know what it is, and that it can be made in many different ways.

If you don't know what it is...

The treble bleed mod is a circuit which can help you keep the treble in the guitar signal, when you're turning down the volume potentiometer.

Probably you know, that when the volume pot knob is turned a little bit down, the guitar signal is quieter and also darker or smoother – it's loosing some high frequencies. Treble bleed mod will help in preventing treble frequencies from bleeding to the ground.

It's made from capacitor, or capacitor and resistor in series or parallel. It should be connected to the input and the output lug (firs and middle) of the volume potentiometer .

There is no perfect treble bleed prevention for a passive circuit. For example:

Guitar Tone Capacitor Values - My Faves

Today, I would like to present my favorite values of tone caps in guitar wirings. It will be the selection for a common type of a tone control: volume pot + capacitor. It's something well known from most of guitars on the market.

If you are thinking about changing the tone cap in your guitar, this short article can be helpful.

This is how I describing my two main purposes of using the potentiometer based guitar tone control:

A:

For soft, warm and jazzy smooth tone, or for the „woman tone”.

Works nice with a well tuned pot - not on full – if you want warmth and smoothness. If you want to get the „woman tone”, it can work well on the maximum turn-on.

B:

Good for making the tone a little bit smoother and well balanced. Works nice if the knob is turned only slightly. Good for small interference of the tone control circuit.

Parts Selection for DIY Boutique Guitar Gear

Probably many of guitar DIY fanciers would like to make a real boutique guitar pedal or use some high-grade parts in a guitar wiring. In this post I would like to show you my selection of capacitors and resistors, that I'm using in preamps and guitar wirings. All of them are selected as parts with good relation between price and quality. They are also quite easy to find in online stores.

CAPACITORS:

red Wima and brown Elna caps

Film:

Vishay MKT1813
Vishay MKP1837
Wima MKP 2
Wima MKP 4
Wima MKP 10

Electrolytic:

Elna Slimic II
Nichicon KZ
Panasonic FC