Recently i found something interesting on the internet. something that bothers me all these years and left unanswered. when we play some blues, the volume knob is the key of music dynamics. Anyone would never get satisfied by the mumbling tone when we reduce the volume via guitar volume knob to get less distorted tone in creating smooth clear overdrive sound. and now i got the one of solution on how to keep bright tone when guitar volume knob is being lowered.
to accomplish that, i needed to go to local radio shack in my town and bought a 0.001 uF capacitor and 150k resistor. it was too cheap, so i bought three of each so i can install them on my other guitars. it worth 0.1 dollars for all of them. if you think it isn’t worth for your expensive guitar, you can get the higher quality. but for me, 0.1 dollars works fine on my guitar.
so, how this 0.1 dollar stuff works? first, connect those in parallel. surely i prepared my solder and soldering iron for this. and here is the result:
then open the back cover of the guitar, find the volume pot, solder the legs to volume pot. i can’t get better picture of this, but the diagram below will explain where to put the legs.
i put these components to my Gretsch G5236 electromatic pro jet 125th anniversary, and it was as expected. no more mumbling tones when i lowered the volume knob.
actually it’s like adding some value to the volume pot, i made a video recorded my activity in installing this component, i found it also reduces humming when the volume pot is in half-full position which is great. i recommend you to do this on your guitar. it’s just cheap and works perfect.
here is the video on YouTube guitar learner channel :