Noob question: Are all potis and capacitors the same (quality)?

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Nevermind, if you crank up the amp loud enough, you can hear the roll off very well on the single cut, too. It seems to be connected to the volume, I didn't know that *idiotalarm*

[fender3x]

They should not differ much. The "J" means +/- 5%. The green "chicklets" a higher tolerance, but it won't be enormous. Both should be pretty close to .022 uf.

Unless the pots are different, my guess is that the difference is in the pickups. If you are not hearing much treble roll off, you probably need a "bigger" cap. Maybe .033 or .047.

A trick I learned from Weirdbits is to allegator clip in a parallel .022 cap to the one you have now. That will give a .044 value, which should sound similar to what a .047 cap sounds like.

On my last couple of builds I put the caps in last for just this reason. It's hard to know what cap value you want until you hear it

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk

[ThatCluelessGerman]

That's a cool trick, thank you!

To be really honest, these are the first times I'm able to use the roll off. I had a Squire Strat back when I was a kid and decided the tone knob sounds horrible, so I never touched it again ;-)

Now, with the tube amp and my single cut builds, I discovered the tone knob is actually useful and on my GR-1SF, the tone knob does really nice things

[Simon Barden]

The kit capacitors probably have a wider tolerance than the orange drop, so may have a lower capacitance value. You’d really need to remove them to measure them.

But turning the volume down will also normally roll-off some treble, so low volume means that you gave to turn the tone pot down more before you start to hear an effect.

Connecting the tone pot to the volume pot output (rather than the input as is almost standard these days) will generally keep most of the treble present when just turning down the volume. But it makes the tone and volume pots interactive and the tone pot can slso adjust the volume a bit when used.

Or you can add a treble bleed circuit across the input and output of the volume pot, which stops treble loss when turning the volume down, and lets the tone control operate as expected at part-volume. The treble bleed can be just a capacitor, a capacitor and resistor in parallel or a capacitor and resistor in series. The latter is my choice but the series/parallel options are very similar in effect. A capacitor on its own will normally make the sound brighter as the volume is turned down, so a resistor is added to limit this effect.

[Simon Barden]

And if one tone pot is log and the other is linear, then they will respond in different ways. Only fully up or down will they sound the same, but for other identical settings they will sound different. Log will affect the tone more slowly than linear. Linear will roll off the treble a lot more quickly, so is better if you want to make big changes in tone fast and with a small rotation of the knob, whilst log is smoother in operation and easier to make small changes in tone with, but you do need to turn it a long way to get a lot of roll-off.

[ThatCluelessGerman]

Hey Simon,
thanks a lot, I always wondered what treble bleed is, but it looks like it's a great idea.
I also guess you could be right and I may have used an A500k in the GR-1SF and I'm pretty sure a B500K in the single cuts. Out with the log pots I guess! :-)

[Simon Barden]

I much prefer log pots for tone controls as I never want that much treble rolled off.

[fender3x]

The linear rather than audio ton pots may account for most of the difference if the pups are the same

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk