Quote Originally Posted by bast902 View Post
Now, I know very little about all of this, and my current assumption is that the capacitor is there to ground out excess energy from any sort of power surge to keep from frying the electronics. If so, what is the difference in how they are placed in these two diagrams? And if my assumption is incorrect, what is actually going on here, circuit-wise?
Shouldn't make a difference, but the capacitor is there to shunt the higher frequency to ground. The pot is wired to represent a variable resistor or resistance which forms a RC network therefore making the HF cut somewhat sweepable. With that said the electronics that comes with the IB -4, IB-5 is junk in my opinion. The pup output is weak and the tone control does almost nothing. I am in the process of replacing all that and will update if I create something better than what is offered.