ID Help, 50's wiring

[Moony]

Complete hogwash. PIO are low quality caps that do nothing for tone.

Unless you buy the Diamond Oil caps from Banzai:

"Banzai Music's Diamond series oil cap brings the bright, warm sunshine to a wide open strawberry field. Lush, creamy, clear, sweet - a breath of fresh air, musical throughout. Audiophile with no compromises"

I mean, that sounds good, doesn't it?

 

[chocol8]

Well, their oil is squeezed from only the highest quality rare tropical snakes.

 

[JohnH]

I reckon the first step is to work out the true value of the pots. Can do it with a multimeter set to Ohms. Do you have that? a cheap one is fine.

Select one pickup
All controls to max
Measure resistance across tip and barrel of the jack, or a cable plugged in. That is close to the pickup resistance. Add 2% to approx allow for pot
Now sweep the volume pot down, and resistance will rise and then fall to zero at min. Feel for the max reading and it will be 1/4 of (pot plus pickup. )
Check that sweeping the tone pot makes no difference (checks the tone cap)

Measure the tone pot directly across its lugs from inside the guitar.

LPs from that age may have 300k pots, and you might prefer 500k.

Do you use the volume and tone pots? or keep at max?

 

[rmlevasseur]

Old days everything was usually max. Now I ride them all day long. My favorite light OD these days is a gemanium fuzz with volume down.

I'll get out the multimeter tomorrow and see what I can tell.

 

[purpleplexi]

For guitar tone caps it doesn't matter. I often use Mallory 150 style as the are cheap, consistently measure close to nominal values, and are readily available from suppliers I order from, but I recently did a guitar with "expensive" orange drops. By spending $10 extra on the over priced caps I hit the free shipping threshold and saved $19 in shipping costs. So the caps were either a little over $5 each or minus $4.50 each depending on perspective.

In short, any foil/film cap will do the job, remain stable, and last longer than you will. I have bigger things to worry about like the which tolex color gives my amps the best mids.

But don't real bursts use PIO caps?

 

[chocol8]

But don't real bursts use PIO caps?

Gibson used what was cheap and readily available. They only used PIO until there was a better option, and starting in 1959 the old “bumblebees“ are in fact Mylar not PIO. The new ones are polyester film, not PIO.

PIO caps go bad and leak. They are garbage being marketed as gold, and guitarists continue to believe the lies no matter how many times they are warned.

 

[purpleplexi]

First thing I do with any guitar I buy is put PIO caps in it. Not only do I hear a considerable improvement from doing so I can hear the difference between different brands of PIO caps. I suspect that if you tell burst owners that they'll be better off binning the original caps in their guitars and replacing them with some nice modern ones you might not get many takers.
This article has an interesting bit about trying some old caps that had drifted way off spec but still sounded 'interesting' which suggests that capacitors in a guitar do more than offer capacitance.

The Ultimate Guide To Vintage Les Paul Tone

We find out precisely what makes golden-era Les Pauls tick and explain how you too can taste the tone fantastic without breaking the bank.

guitar.com

 

[chocol8]

Complete snake oil. You can clearly hear a difference until you do a blind test with money on the line. You won’t pass, no one does.

And yes, you wouldn’t change anything original on a collectible guitar, but that has nothing to do with tone and certainly nothing to do with PIO since half of the bursts have Mylar caps.

 

[Scumback Speakers]

Eh, I've been using Sprague Bumble Bees for years (or Black Beauty's). I have decided .022 400v caps aren't quite "it" for me. I run an .015 400v in the neck and .033 400v in the bridge of my Gibsons now. In fact, I ordered two of each yesterday from eBay. I have had Orange Drops, wafer thin caps, etc. Don't get the same tone, so I swapped them out for Bees/Beauties.

The new ones, to me, are so exact/clinical that they take something away from the more organic tone of Bees.

Snake oil? Hmm, maybe to you, but I'm not changing from what I know works for me. YMMV

 

[ELS]

Good idea, you can also make your own:

I wouldn't do this, it creates a notch at the top of the tone range so you hear a big jump when you turn the tone from 10 to 9. Not fun.

Complete hogwash. PIO are low quality caps that do nothing for tone. His caps look like foil caps which is a good thing.

"Construction can make an impact"
"PIO is BS"
What's your logic for PIO being low quality?
Just don't get crappy modern "clones"; the super overpriced Gibson ones aren't even paper caps at all, they're a foil cap put into a bumblebee shell.
The problem with PIO's is that almost nobody knew how to make them truely hermetic, resulting in the paper absorbing moisture and getting leaky. old russian PIO's are always good, because they got the sealing system right sealed in a glass shell.
You can fix leaky paper caps, if they're wax, you can melt some beeswax, and put the cap inside it for a few hours until the water evaporated (it stops bubbling). If it's an oil cap, you need access to a vacuum pump, put the cap inside a container filled with mineral oil and pull a vacuum on it, the water will start bubbling out, you can't use heat because it burns the oil.
It works, 0 leakage afterwards.

Oh and the 2 dumbest things I've ever heard said is "A capacitor is a capacitor, it cannot make any difference what kind it is" and "the tone capacitor has 0 impact when you have the tone set to 10"
Ever hear of dielectric loss? at certain frequencies some dielectrics don't work as well as others. creating an EQ curve. Ever hear of inductance? some capacitor types like polystyrene are often inductive, also changing the EQ curve. Ever hear of non-linear capacitors? why do you think ceramic disc caps "aren't ideal for audio"... it's because they aren't linear and start to "clip" at the end of their voltage rating. Also hear of microphonics, in a guitar it can especially change the tone when the cap picks up the vibrations.
The effects of the capacitor will also change the resonance frequency of the pickup, it wont just roll off the highs. Pair that with some capacitors that are inductive, and have high loss at high frequencies, the response of the pickup will change drastically.
And if you put a .02 cap in series with a 500k resistor across the pickup, it will clearly sound darker. that's the effect of the tone control on max setting.

Instead what you should be telling people is that a "better tone" doesn't make you play better, in fact I've noticed it makes you play worse. It's sort of like compensating for now knowing how to play by saturating the audio with "ToNe"
When your guitar sounds like shit, you try harder to make it sound good, You learn how to pick the notes to make them sound a certain way, and when you finally get it down to every note, you'll sound way better than someone else with a Billy Gibson's LP, with Eddie Van Halen's plexi and Jimi Hendrix used fuzz face... or whatever

 

[plexipaul]

Old days everything was usually max. Now I ride them all day long. My favorite light OD these days is a gemanium fuzz with volume down.

I'll get out the multimeter tomorrow and see what I can tell.

I suggest you rewire to 50s with independent volume control AND add 2 ceramic highpassfilter caps ( 2x 40 cents).It`s cheap to do and you get much better control over the taper.

 

[Moony]

I wouldn't do this

I don't use such DIY no-load pots either, I just wanted to show that method as an alternative to the Fender/CTS ones you can buy.

Regarding the tone caps - I personally like the yellow Sozo caps (the older Standard series and the newer NexGen), I'm using 10n, that's enough for me. With 22n I never rolled the tone pot back completely.

I would recommend simply soldering leads to the pots (temporarily) with alligator clips and trying different values and manufacturers.of tone caps - that's what I did.

 

[rmlevasseur]

I reckon the first step is to work out the true value of the pots. Can do it with a multimeter set to Ohms. Do you have that? a cheap one is fine.

Select one pickup
All controls to max
Measure resistance across tip and barrel of the jack, or a cable plugged in. That is close to the pickup resistance. Add 2% to approx allow for pot
Now sweep the volume pot down, and resistance will rise and then fall to zero at min. Feel for the max reading and it will be 1/4 of (pot plus pickup. )
Check that sweeping the tone pot makes no difference (checks the tone cap)

Measure the tone pot directly across its lugs from inside the guitar.

LPs from that age may have 300k pots, and you might prefer 500k.

Do you use the volume and tone pots? or keep a

On the neck pickup, the resistance reads 7.50.

The tone pot on the neck reads .468 and on the bridge .498.

The volume pots read .741 and .742. I didn't unsolder the lug grounds to the pot so I assume that's why those read that way.

I appreciate all the comments. I lowered the neck pickup a bit and I must admit that did help a lot. Just goes to show you to set up by ear and not spec, as I followed Gibson's specs when I set it up. Still, there is a nasal frequency in there I dont like which maybe a different cap would help with. I also need volume pots with a better taper maybe? Seems 0-4 is pretty useless.

In the end, this guitar might just be what it is. For high gain mayhem it's just awesome. For clean, bloopy jazz it is very dark and warm. But for edge of break up and low gain stuff like zep/Bonamassa it lacks clarity and has a tinge of cocked wah sound.

 

[purpleplexi]

Complete snake oil. You can clearly hear a difference until you do a blind test with money on the line. You won’t pass, no one does.

And yes, you wouldn’t change anything original on a collectible guitar, but that has nothing to do with tone and certainly nothing to do with PIO since half of the bursts have Mylar caps.

I'm not here to convince you that you can hear something that you obviously can't.

 

[rmlevasseur]

I did a lot of research on this and watched enough comparison videos to believe there is a difference. I have heard some people specifically describe a nasal or "wah" sound associated with some caps that some people seem to like, but I want to specifically dial out. I wound up ordering a Luxe cap and a Vitamin cap from mojotone to experiment with. This is the first time I have played around with caps and figured it was worth deciding for myself.

 

[ELS]

I'm not here to convince you that you can hear something that you obviously can't.

All capacitors are the same and you must agree.
Compare a ceramic disc cap to a wax cap. Or a tantalum to a silver mica. Or even different electrolytics, I was testing out the feedback bypass caps for a fuzz box and found that the nichicon or rubycon caps didn't have as much bass as the few super cheapy early 2000s caps I took from old circuits, they clearly had more bass. And also one nichicon cap which was a 160V rated one, very big.
Then there was also I believe a phillips cap, which was 16V rated but was bigger in diameter and shorter in length than the others. that had more bass
You could say it's just because of a dried out cap but that OBVIOUSLY proves that electrolytics clearly would sound different when they have aged.

When testing out the output coupling cap I didn't find much change in the characteristics only the EQ, apart for a tantalum, it made it super crunchy unlike every other cap type. I didn't like that crunch tho.
The input cap was more impacting tho, I settled on one particular model PIO cap there, I tested other PIO models but they didn't have the dynamic range.
I also found that around 0.1 is the smallest value you can go on the input coupling cap, any lower and it made the neck pickup sound insanely thin, it's a very narrow transition when choosing values which was odd.

For the tone capacitor in my LP there was a slight difference in wax vs oil, the wax cap would stay cleaner for longer, it sort of sounded "mild"... still I couldnt tell which sounded best, I just went for the PIO because of tradition



Clearly it gets softer with the wax one
Oh and both caps had 0 leakage, I boiled them both in wax or oil respectively. The oil started decomposing from the heat tho.
I was gonna record more comparisons but I got fed up with all the buzz, I'll make a shielded AB box with a switch.

 

[rmlevasseur]

Well my cap job is complete and I am very happy with the results. I discovered that both of the old caps were at .015. I went with a Vitamin T .022 in the bridge and and a Luxe Bumblebee .015 in the neck. Much of the mud and nasal tone is gone, and even though I didn't change pots they all seem much more active and useable in all ranges now. That was an added benefit as I didn't expect the volume pots to be more responsive because of a cap change. For me, this was a pretty noticeable change all all-around and I am glad I tried this.