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Post by monkey hotel on Oct 27, 2016 14:06:38 GMT -5
Dear Guitarnutz,
lately, i stumble upon diagrams that use resistors instead of/in addition to capacitors as a means to reduce treble.
I wonder if there's a difference in tone.
Also, is there a rule to it, e.g. "a fixed 150k resistor in parallel with a PU equals a 0.001uF cap"?
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Post by ashcatlt on Oct 27, 2016 19:28:19 GMT -5
Short answer is no, there's no direct correspondence like that. This is a complex system of inductance, capacitance, and resistance and everything interacts with everything else, so it's tough to make generalizations, but... In general ( ), a resistor parallel to the pickup will reduce the resonant peak at the cutoff frequency while a capacitor will tend to lower the actual cutoff frequency itself. A standard tone control actually kind of does both. For half or so of the rotation down from 10, it's the resistance working against the inductance of the pickup that darkens the tone. Toward the bottom, the cap starts to do its thing, part of which is to actually stop the LR filter cutoff from going toward 0 and killing the whole signal. If you're interested in these things, take a look in our Reference section at JohnH's GuitarFreak spreadsheet app, and if you want to get super geeky, check out the new subforum of the Pickups section which is all about analysis of various pickups and their interactions with each other and the rest of the circuit.
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Post by monkey hotel on Oct 28, 2016 9:50:35 GMT -5
Thank you ashcatlt for your explanation. Tough subject...I'll check that out during the upcoming winter.
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