Don’t replace those capacitors

Seriously, don’t replace the tone capacitors in your guitars with more expansive ones. If you need some, don’t even buy them at a music store. If you spent more then a few cents, you spent too much. Period.

Okay, maybe I should elaborate: Music stores around the world will sell really expansive capacitors, build like they did it seventy or more years ago; some are even filled with oil. They have fancy names like Vitamin T, Custom Cap, or Orange Drop, and will be around a hundred times more expensive than their normal, modern variants. As far as I know, these older parts are only manufactured for guitarists. No one else, expect maybe people interested in preserving historical electronics, will use them because they are not only more expansive, but also less reliables, have higher tolerances, and are way bigger. The oil filled ones may even dry out and will have to be replaced after a couple of years. So why do they still exist and why do we find lot of people on the net that will tell you to replace the ‘cheap’ modern components? I don’t really know, because those historic components are practically inferior in every way you can think of.

Purists may argument that the small imperfections of the historic components make them sound better or warmer. However, they still are capacitors, nothing more, and there are only so many ways a capacitor can be imperfect (it can for example have a leakage and a contact resistance). If these imperfections existed in a significant manner and if they would affect the sound, they could easily be replicated using a few additional, modern components. And for the price of one of the historic components you could get a LOT of modern resistors, capacitors, and even inductors if necessary. But no guitar manufacturer I know of puts more than a single modern capacitor on the tone potentiometer. I wonder why… So, before you invest in historic, unreliable components to improve your sound, I rather suggest experimenting with different capacitor values. This will change how the tone potentiometer affects your guitar’s sound, with higher capacitances cutting off more of the high-end and vice versa.

By the way: Everything I said above goes for resistors some big guitar manufacturer calls Tone Saver. Here you’ll pay up a thousand times the price of a modern, more durable component, which does exactly the same.

Also by the way: There is a point to be made for expansive potentiometers and switches, as these electromechanical components are way more complex to manufacture and necessarily wear down when used. More expensive ones should last longer and have less glitches.