Tone mods

[Mike McLane]

This is not a "pedal" question, but a guitar "tone circuit" question and hope not inappropriate for the PPCB forum. I've got a Tele with a humbucker neck pup and standard single coil bridge pup. I want to keep the stock Tele sound when needed, but want to "dumb down" the bridge to balance tonally with the HB for general use so was considering a push/pull that could insert a fixed resistor/cap network on the bridge pup. Fralin employs an "unresisted" 1500pf cap (calls it his Magic Cap) for that purpose. I can back of my tone pot a bit (.022 cap) and get something of the same effect. I'm interested in what the response curves would look like btw the Fralin approach a couple of larger cap values downstream of a resistor. I downloaded the Duncan Tone Stack Calculator to see if I could simulate this scenario, but it didn't look like it would do the trick. Anybody got any recommendations?

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

The TSC is not applicable for this approach.
You can easily try combinations of series R-C across the guitar's output without opening up the guitar. Get two 1/4" jacks and wire them up together tip to tip and sleeve to sleeve. Plug the guitar in to one and the amp into the other. Use clip leads to connect the res & cap from tip to sleeve. The R & C should be in series. The cap sets the tuning of the added filter and the R sets the strength of the filtering. You can use a 250K pot for the R.

 

[Mike McLane]

Gotcha. I was actually going to make a little "black box" with a couple of small value caps @ 0 resistance and a couple of larger value caps preceded by a 250K pot with a rotary switch to toggle btw and let my ears "do the walking" (you may be old enough to remember that one). Then I realized that I have the .0015 on my Strat's bridge pup along with a master 250K/.022 tone circuit so I could toggle back and forth btw those. At the sweet spot of the 250K/.022 there's a discernible difference, but nothing that would cause me to lay awake at night. Thx for your input.