High Voltage Capacitors:The Secret To Vintage Sounding Electric Guitars?

in electricguitar •  6 years ago 

In this day and age, Gibson Les Pauls, Fender Strats and related models from the 1950s and 1960s - i.e. The Golden Age of the Electric Guitar - are now commanding exhorbitant prices that even one with a batttered paint job but with still functonal hardware and original PAF pickups are as ecpensive as South Korean family sedans. But given that the most affordable ones mere mortals can afford -i.e. 500 to 1,000 USD - tend to use DiMarzio style pickups from 1973 onwards that althoigh sound really cool is not exactly what you want to use if most of your gigs involve playing with an Elvis or a Beatles tribute band. Is there a way around this dillema?
Maybe I'm not the only onr who discovered it but back in 2015 while fixing a Japanese made Les Paul copy that was probably made around 1977 which was brought to me due yo a hum and RF interference problem, I've noticed that its ceramic grounding / filtering capacitor rated at 10 picofarad 630 volts had one of its legs / terminals suffering from metal fatigue and can no longer be soldered back to place, I went to our neighborhood electronics parts store to replace it. Sadly, they stopped stocking 630 volt ceramic capacitors since 2001 and only had ones in the 50 volt range. Given that the owner primarily uses a vacuum tube electric guitar amp, I opted not to use a lower voltage ceramic to avoid destroying the guitar and amp. I opted instead to use a 10 picofarad 1,600 volt ceramic cappacitor I salvaged from a busted compact fluorescent light bulb. Inexplicably, it made the guitar that I'm trying to fix sound more vintage.

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