Story of the Suhr pickup magnets :

[Possum]

I should point out that not all CBS era pickups were lacquer potted, the '65 first year strat I unwound was wax potted and you see many of these on Ebay, very easy to spot. I don't think they lacquer potted for very long before customer complaints made them go back to wax....

[Telemachos]

Not sure if he really cared that much. This cat played whatever strat he could lay a hand on during his tours. The big head stock strats were THE strats of the days, so who wouldn't go for that, especially w. that Hippie curved head stock. Those were hip, not the pre CBS Hillbilly strats and Teles

[Telemachos]

I should point out that not all CBS era pickups were lacquer potted, the '65 first year strat I unwound was wax potted and you see many of these on Ebay, very easy to spot. I don't think they lacquer potted for very long before customer complaints made them go back to wax....

True, my 65 strat w. a transition logo on its' small peg head had exactly those too. I don't know exactly when they started to laquer their PUs.

[Telemachos]

......... Personally I could care less about the taper on a pot, I'm more concerned that its transparent and doesn't get in the way. The Historic pots I got all measured 444K! Oooops. Yeah longer taper, would be good for bridge pickups at that low reading. But the other really weird thing about them is they took about a month to break-in. They sounded extremely dark, even though I scraped the track to raise it to useable levels, eventually it opened up and sounded clear, but I'm not going to use these or recommend them.

I stuffed a Crower cam into my 428 and replaced the mufflers w. long glass pipes. Why should I choke my gitah? Know what? I don't use any caps, tone pots or any freakin' thing at all on some of my guitars. The tone goes from the volume pot. right into the output jack. The knobs and pots are all in place but out of the cirquit. Just dummys to look nice. It's a good tone to my ears.

[Mike Sulzer]

Some of the boutique paper in oil caps are just film caps in disguise.

Caps won't do anything to the guitar's tone with the control on 10.

Unless the cap is completely open. Then the tone pot does not load the circuit and the Q rises a bit. But when we are talking about capacitor differences, we usually assume that they are actual capacitors and not open circuits! You do have to watch out for broken ones, though.

[Possum]

Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstrat was wired like that, no tone control or tone cap, just volume pot and pickup. With his '62 Patent it was a searing bright tone, but he made it work obviously ;-) I did some testing minimally of ceramic disk caps, new vs. older stock. I have to say that when I was working on the '65 Strat set I found the best sounding caps were some NOS large diameter .50uf, probably from the 70's. The equivalent new ones I tried didn't have much character. Orginally the first Strats had .1uf tone caps, I tried modern ones and just felt it make the pickups lose too much sizzle. I'm not sure what the original type of caps Fender used, they are called "phonebook" caps and NOS ones are almost impossible to locate. There's some guys making "replicas," well its kind of ridiculous to stick some cheap cap in a blob of wax and call it a true replica, because they don't sound right, Gibson's bee caps are a prime example of that kind of thinking.

[Possum]

There's an interesting thread here on Strat tone caps. They seem to be saying the phonebook caps were Cornell Dubiliers and were paper in oil?
Tone capacitor question - Fender Stratocaster Guitar Forum

Found out they were paper and foil, wax dielectric. Allessandro has ones made the old way, not some military cap stuck in a wax mold. I wonder if they are worth the money, $37.50.....

[David Schwab]

Unless the cap is completely open. Then the tone pot does not load the circuit and the Q rises a bit. But when we are talking about capacitor differences, we usually assume that they are actual capacitors and not open circuits! You do have to watch out for broken ones, though.

A quote from you:

As you turn down the tone control pot from ten, the major effect is changing the resistive loading on the resonant circuit. This is because the impedance of the capacitor in the range of the resonance is a lot less than the pot value. As the pot gets closer to zero, the capacitor becomes important, but the initial effect is just resistive loading.

I said "Caps won't do anything to the guitar's tone with the control on 10." But the tone pot resistance does.

[Mike Sulzer]

Right. I like to look at this as analogous to a coupling capacitor. A good coupling capacitor has essentially no effect on the audio. But if you forget to put it in the circuit, you do notice.

[David Schwab]

But if you forget to put it in the circuit, you do notice.

Oh is that what you were saying? I didn't pick up on that. Of course in that case the tone control doesn't work either.

[Mike Sulzer]

Oh is that what you were saying? I didn't pick up on that. Of course in that case the tone control doesn't work either.

Exactly.

[RedHouse]

...Just because a pickup or a guitar is vintage doesn't mean its something special, we had an annoying guy show up...

Like the annoying guy who rants on about PAF's and their screws/slugs/magnets/keepers/baseplates being something special all the time?, oh sorry, I misread the post, my bad.

(just kidding)

[Possum]

I find that luthiers all seem to share these odd beliefs, which is why I rip their harnesses out because any pickups put in them sound bland and lifeless. Cheesy plastic shielded wire, cheap ceramic tone caps, cheap pots. You find that stuff in the most expensive guitars. I built a new harness a few weeks ago, into a high end Japanese guitar that costs $4500, luthier built, horrible harness. Huge improvement by replacing it all. Coupling caps in amps are extremely important and have a big effect on the sound of the amp by what value, brand, and type of cap. I spent several days trying a lot of different coupling caps in the Princeton I built, they all made the amp sound different. How anyone could miss this stuff at all amazes me, unless you've never actually tried any of it. Maybe in a crappy harness you don't hear the effects of changing tone caps because the cheap wire is already killing so much stuff, but I really doubt that. Maybe in bass guitars its not as noticeable because you're just not dealing with 6khz treble peaks. Pots have a big effect too, not just in what value they are but who made them. I recently tried Gibson's Historic pots they now sell, there's something wrong with them, they sound muddy and dark for about 3 weeks then get a little more clear but never really become as transparent as they should be so threw them away. Alphas sound dark and don't let you hear the pickups as good as CTS pots do. I put years into trying all kinds of things in harnesses, so this isn't book theory, its stuff I work with all the time. I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this dumb conversation again, LOL ;-)

[big_teee]

Plastic shielded wire has no tone!
Cap values change tone, not how much they cost.
Same with Pots, they are a variable resistor, that is all.

[JGundry]

Plastic shielded wire has no tone!

Um well, it does when you compare it to a harness dipped in Dave's secret dielectric sauce. I hear it takes a couple of weeks for Dave to make the sauce but apparently it is worth the effort. Even though it takes two weeks I think making the sauce is premature without hard data. Eeeewwwwwwwww!!!!!!!