In my tone cap material types comparison, there were a couple vintage caps which I couldn’t identify. I referred to them anonymously as the Yellow Cylinder and the Fat Gray Cylinder.
Today, a kind gentleman by the name of Bill Zumwalt was able to give me the clues I needed to track these old caps down and unmask their true identities. The search keywords I needed were CDE and Mustard! More
I’ve received a lot of questions and comments about my tone cap videos part 1 and part 2.
In this video (split into two parts due to YouTube length limits), I answer some of those questions, and record some more examples. I talk about 50’s versus modern wiring, my recording setup and how the audio is processed, and how to do double-blind testing. I measure the cap values, and record another set of examples, now including ceramic caps and distorted examples.
Well, part 2 of the tone video took waaaay longer than I anticipated! I spent a ridiculous amount of time editing, and animating illustrations of the tone circuit.
Here I present a tutorial on how to read cap values, an explanation of how the capacitance and resistance work together as an RC filter in the tone circuit, and some audio examples to help in selecting a useful cap value for a tone circuit. More
After much deliberation, experimentation, determination, and the inevitable procrastination and distraction… I’ve finally completed this comparison of tone capacitor material types and capacitance values. In part 1, I’ll evaluate a bunch of different dialectric material types to see how they change the character of the sound. In part 2, I’ll cover how different capacitance values affect the range and usefulness of the tone pot.
First, I built this Tone Thing 🙂 It’s a piece of cardboard on which I mounted 7 different capacitor material types, and 7 Orange Drops of different capacitance values, and one Bourns 500k audio taper pot. This is connected up with alligator clips to my Epiphone Riviera P93, in parallel with the signal at the output jack (the same place as the master tone in a regular guitar circuit).