jammonster
Rookie Solder Flinger
Posts: 7
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Post by jammonster on Jun 20, 2009 22:29:06 GMT -5
Hey guitar gabbers, hope everthing is staying in tune. I luv vintage tone. So I am going all out on my SG. I was at the local musac store with a couple of buddies, and we were checking out some vintage reissues. I cam across a gem 61' SG with a bigsby tail piece. It is the first SG I have played that has burstbuckers 1 and 2. Needless to say, it sounded sick. The holy grail. Nailed the allman Bros. tone in 5 sec.. Anywho, one of my friends who is a guitar doctor, decided to open this thing to see what kind of guts are in there. He smiled, and said the bumblebee's stinger, mean the bumblebee capacitors. And they are not cheap. Another friend told me that it's all about eye candy. They all fuction about the same. Is this true?? I think for $60.00 a piece, they have to contribute something to that awesome tone. If they do I want them in mine. Any advice would be cool...Keep rocking........
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Post by newey on Jun 20, 2009 23:20:04 GMT -5
JM- Pretty much everything that can be said about capacitors for guitars was said in Capacitors For Guitars. There's 6 pages of cap FAQ in there. $60 capacitors sound the best, if you're in the business of selling $60 capacitors . . .  If I can presume to distill the essence of that 6 pages, it's that, while cap construction and materials could, in theory, contribute to a different tone, any differences are probably too subtle to hear. While the use of cheap ceramic caps was discouraged in the thread, there is no reason (that anyone is likely to hear) to use expensive wax/oil caps. And anything "vintage", when it comes to electronic components, means only that it's old. Some wines improve with age. Wood ages. Electronics tend to disintegrate over time. IOW, save your money. The main contributors to "tone" in a guitar are the pickups, the body, the bridge, the nut and the strings. Other components are way down the list. BTW, you ever notice that the vintage guitar crowd insists on vintage capacitors, cloth-cover wire, vintage pups- but they seem to draw the line at using 50 year old guitar strings!  Apparently, not everything "vintage" is good.  |
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Post by wolf on Jun 21, 2009 2:43:32 GMT -5
We also had a more recent discussion about capacitors. Rather than linking to that message board thread, the topic really centered around an article in Premier Guitar magazine in March and April, 2008. Here are the links: www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2008/Mar/Auditioning_Tone_Capacitors.aspx www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Issue/2008/Apr/Auditioning_Tone_Capacitors_Part_II.aspxThe April 2008 article discusses bumblebee capacitors, Sprague Orange Drops and all those other "vital" components that are absolutely "essential" to getting that vintage tone. LOL Incidentally, I also have a Gibson SG Standard. Unlike you, I have a 1980 SG which of course was built when Gibson was owned by the Norlin Corporation, thus totally destroying any attempt to generate vintage tones like the ones that were made in 1961, etc. If you want to see it, go to this page on my website www.1728.com/super7.htm (and you'll see 7 guitars I seriously rewired). There are incredible amounts of "vintage guitar" rumors and if you believed them, you know you couldn't possibly achieve the vintage tone of those musicians of many decades ago because they don't make 'em like that anymore, trees had different growth rates back when they made the "good" instruments, and so on. Perhaps the best advice is from the great American philosopher Yogi Berra: " Ninety per cent of the time, you can't believe half those things". |
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Post by newey on Jun 21, 2009 10:17:21 GMT -5
And, let's not forget that the amp probably plays a bigger role than the guitar in getting "that tone".
A good amp will make even a crappy guitar sound halfway decent, while a crappy amp will sound lousy no matter what you plug into it.
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Post by gumbo on Jun 21, 2009 10:25:24 GMT -5
...while a crappy guitar with crappy capacitors plugged into a crappy amp sounds like... ;D
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Post by cynical1 on Jun 21, 2009 11:00:24 GMT -5
...while a crappy guitar with crappy capacitors plugged into a crappy amp sounds like... ;D ...the vintage tone we all remember...because it's all we could afford 40 years ago when the vintage stuff was new... |
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Post by sumgai on Jun 21, 2009 14:49:41 GMT -5
...while a crappy guitar with crappy capacitors plugged into a crappy amp sounds like... ;D
...the vintage tone we all remember...because it's all we could afford 40 years ago when the vintage stuff was new...How true, how oh-so-true.  'monster, the bottom line for you is a simple question: could a blindfolded player easily pick the correct option (A or B) every time, saying "Yeah, that's the one with the super-duper $60 capacitors in it". Of course, that's an over-simplified way of looking at it, but in a nutshell, even if one player can tell the difference, can a major portion of them tell? And as much to the point, can they do so under real-life conditions, and not in a pristine sound-proof booth? (Try running a double-blindfold test on a stage at a bar sometime.....  ) My modus operandi has always been if it sounds good to me, then I'll use it. I don't worry about re-sale value, nor about "brownie points" with other players, none of that crap. But if there's a choice between an expensive option and an inexpensive one, then the expensive one had better be come with hot and cold running women, or I ain't buying it. ;D HTH sumgai |
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Post by newey on Jun 21, 2009 16:03:22 GMT -5
Hot or cold, it's better if they sit still for a minute . . . ;D ;D
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Post by lpf3 on Jun 21, 2009 16:03:38 GMT -5
today at 11:49 a.m., sumgai wrote:Isn't that the reason most of us got into this whole guitar thing in the first place? ;D -lpf3
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Post by sumgai on Jun 21, 2009 18:08:33 GMT -5
newey, No, I like a challenge, even at my age! ;D lpf3, Well, I got started at 10 years of age. I was holding wood before I knew what that meant!  sumgai |
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Post by sydsbluesky on Jun 22, 2009 22:54:44 GMT -5
60 dollar bumblebees?
I'm still mad that I had to buy a three pack of the cheap ceramic ones when I only needed one.
I could have spent that extra buck twenty to upgrade my breakfast instead of my guitar.
Bacon tastes better than any tonewood I've ever had.
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Post by gumbo on Jun 26, 2009 6:15:49 GMT -5
...ah, yes,....
...but if that crappy breakfast was in a crappy bowl and you had to eat it with a crappy spoon, it would taste like.....
....all the breakfasts we used to think were soooo great 40 years ago ;D
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jammonster
Rookie Solder Flinger
Posts: 7
Likes: 0
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Post by jammonster on Jun 27, 2009 6:58:39 GMT -5
Just wanna say thanks for the imput peeps!
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Apparently, not everything "vintage" is good. 
)
