LS-320 caps ?? what'ca got??

[JVsearch]

BTW, do you think capacitors affect the tone even without moving the tone pots?

Nope. I used to think so - in fact I bought a pair of audiophile grade tone caps for my tokai (they even had silver connecting leads...) but if you think about it for a second you realise that the tone caps are there to bleed your guitar signal to ground. You never actually hear the signal that passes through them! :lol:

The tone cap only bleeds part of the frequency spectrum to ground - the rest is let through, that's what the cap does. The value of the cap sets the point of the frequency roll off. The Clapton mod: using a 0.015 cap on the neck pickup sets the frequency roll off higher up the spectrum than a 0.022 cap, thus allowing more highs into the tone - less of the high end is bled to ground.

When tone is set to 10 - not sure what would be going on there, but it will not be cut and dried. The load at the end of your guitar cable can even change things depending on what it is. Try a fuzz pedal with a LP, they often sound best when the volume pot is rolled back a bit. This is because many fuzz pedals have an input impedance of below 500K ohms, so when the pickup driving the 500k ohm pot meets something less than itself it's not ideal. Lowering the volume pot puts say 350k looking at the fuzz's approx 470k and there is a slight improvement in tone. An output impedance always like to drive into a higher impedance, especially when it is low current like in a guitar.

You don't normally have to worry about any of this because most amps have a 1 meg ohm input impedance, and Boss pedals are all around that level as well (I think).

(Chose 470k for the fuzz pedal because that's what mine is)

 

[ganzua]

The load at the end of your guitar cable can even change things depending on what it is.

It does change things because cables have a capacitance value too.

 

[Mc Tanza]

It does change things because cables have a capacitance value too.

And inductance, and impedance... The wonderful real world of imperfect electronics :lol: .

 

[Paladin2019]

The tone cap only bleeds part of the frequency spectrum to ground - the rest is let through, that's what the cap does. The value of the cap sets the point of the frequency roll off. The Clapton mod: using a 0.015 cap on the neck pickup sets the frequency roll off higher up the spectrum than a 0.022 cap, thus allowing more highs into the tone - less of the high end is bled to ground.

Exactly. The capacitance value is important, but the choice of material is insignificant. The part of the signal that passes through the cap goes to ground and the rest is shunted out by the pot. You don't hear the stuff that goes through the cap, so quality, fidelity and signal/noise ratio are non-issues.

Try a fuzz pedal with a LP, they often sound best when the volume pot is rolled back a bit.

One of my personal favourite tones 8)

Amp at breakup, pedal at unity gain, fuzz knob maxed and guitar volume at ~7. Roll it back up to 10 for some really filthy old-school solo noises. 8) 8) 8)