Pots and caps, take a bow, y'all...

[robb]

Just a line to say thanks to all of you - you know who you are - who were kind enough to respond to all my questions on pots and caps.
Have just finished "rebuilding" the guts of my 99 LP Standard with 500K CTS pots and .02mfd ceramic caps.
I also went the whole hog and did the nail varnish job on the tone pots.
What can I say! WHHOOOAAAA! is that better or what?
Suddenly, I got a bird that sings, I got a bird that moans.
The whole danged thing is alive in my hands.
There's fabulous definition without harshness and there's not a trace of mud anywhere on the back end.
'Fraid my Telecaster will be staying in its case for a while.
Thanks, you guys. Great advice - and IT WORKS!

 

[BrianGWN]

If you are still tweaking, you may get better results with a better tone cap other than ceramic. As well you might like the results of a slightly smaller size, .015 uF has been used by some around here.

As to the nail polish disconnecting tone control mod, cool isn't it? The 498T pickup does sing rather better once the tone control gets disconnected, doesn't it? hee hee.

 

[sundaypunch]

I'm electrically impaired and don't fully understand the specifics of different capacitors. I've upgraded to CTS pot's and got them all over 500k (big improvement). Do upgraded capacitors change the sound when everything is on "10" or only as you start rolling off on the tone?

 

[toni]

Brian,

The nail polish trick may work well with very hot pickups like 498's, but when i tried it with Classic 57's, it was very harsh and dry.
Do you agree ?

Sundaypunch,

It does a little difference when the pots are set to 10, but very subtle.

 

[BrianGWN]

toni, yeah that observation would be well within reason.
As a general rule of thumb, as pickups are wound significantly stronger than some given point of reference, that would tend to result in a enhanced midrange together with some loss of highs. As such, the stronger pickups would often gain some useful top end response/presence when the loading is reduced from having the tone control disconnected.

However, if you are starting with a moderate output pickup with a decent low/mid/high balance, reducing the loading on the pickup by eliminating the tone control could mean the upper-mid resonant peak of the pickup could become too pronounced. The tone could cross the line from "extra-bright" to something like what you described.
You might get a similar observation if you tried using a 1Meg volume pot with a '57 Classic, different modification but one that also reduces the pickup loading, possibly too much.

 

[BrianGWN]

sundaypunch, one of the issues with the tone capacitors is a general concept that appears to also apply with the pots. The concept is that although a capacitor is in theory supposed to be just a capacitor, and likewise a potentiometer is supposed to be just that only a resistance, in practice there are other minor fringe characteristics that aren't necessarily intended to be there but they exist as a practical compromise of the component's design.
Capacitors will have certain stray characteristics, an effective amount of series resistance (usually quite small), parallel resistance (usually large), and sometimes even some small amount of the opposite behaviour, inductance. This means that capacitors of the same value but of different designs/materials will sometimes produce noticeably different results when used in certain applications, such as tone caps.

With some pots, I suspect the inherent built in equivalent capacitance is higher. For example the better pots probably have a lower capacitance. The recent Gibson pots with the plastic insides are likely equivalent in an electrical sense to using a CTS pot with something like a small 22 picofarad capacitor connected in parallel.

 

[toni]

Brian,

i did try the 1 meg pots with Classic 57's also, and the result was the same as disconnected tone pots, YEK !
so your theory makes sense to me.

thanks