September 18, 2020
September 18, 2020
Many years ago I saw Eric Clapton at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan. All through the show, I kept hearing Dire Straits. Finally, I grabbed someone's binoculars, and sure enough, there was Mark Knopfler! Since then I found out they are great buddies, and tour together a lot. Clapton was so cool, he let his tour guitarist have the final encore, this:
The subject of capacitors in guitars is rife with fraud and nonsense. The fact is, the capacitor is not IN the signal path, it is very much OUT of it, and only has any effect when you select it, which is probably pretty seldom. The capacitor is part of a low-pass ( or rarely high-pass ) filter, basically a frequency-dependent leak to ground. It is not making 'tone', it is taking it away. The type of capacitor that you use for this really doesn't matter at all, as long as you don't use a polarized one the wrong way. Orange Drop, oil-in-paper, film, ceramic -- makes no difference. Anyone who claims it does either has a very vivid imagination or is trying to sell you something.
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