Too Much Treble Bleed

[George Brown]

hey i remember reading somewhere in a magazine that if you put treble bleed caps on both volumes in a les paul style guitar you could inrease the trelble too much when altering the volume controls. i cannot remember if it was only in the middle position, another thing i am not aware of is if the controllers were wired interactivly. is this true? and would it afect a les paul style guitar with the volumes wired independantly?

[Robert_the_damned]

I think this is correct. The volume controls on SOME les pauls are 'interactive'. it depends how they've been wired. I believe most come wired that way though.

As far as I'm aware a les paul with seperatly wired volume pots wouldn't be affected by this 'over bleed'.

Robert

[George Brown]

it is rather odd. i read about it in a guitar magazine, this guy complained after adding treble bleed caps to his les paul when he backed off on the volume treble increase rather than staying level (the idea of a treble bleed) in response he was told that on two volume guitars you shouldnt instal treble bleed caps as this happens and was not due to using incorrect cap sizes, i was guessing that it could be due to interactive guitar volume wirring. it may also be worth a note that prs single cuts dont have treble bleeds whereas customs do dont know if this is related i was just reading my mag at the mo'

[JoeAArthur]

This is kind of like that joke... right? You know the one, where you go to the doctor and say "doc, it hurts when I do this" and the doctor responds "then don't do that!!"

Nope, never heard that you shouldn't install treble bleed caps in a dual volume control guitar. Can't think of any reason why you can't or why dual volumes should give more of a treble boost when turned down compared to a single volume. I have many guitars with treble bleeds, both dual volumes wired interactive as well as non-interactive.

Treble bleed cap values will always be a compromise. It's simple equalization exercise - give a treble boost so that when something else takes it away the response will be flat. In order to be flat, the boost has to be equal to the cut - otherwise you have too much of one not enough of the other. By the way, the treble cut you are trying to equalize out comes from cable capacitance. Change cables and things might not work as well as they did.

The boosting action CAN be controlled by the value of the cap. If you get too much boost then reduce the value of the cap so that the boost starts at a higher frequency. With 500K pots it does help to reduce the value of the cap... something like 500-680 pico seems to work well. I usually use a .001 micro with 250K pots.

[George Brown]

yeh i thought this was wierd, wanted to check it with you guys. unfortunately some people in the guitar industary will take utter rubish cough ed roman cough