Worked on telecaster today which had a sound problem. Sound was very bassy and ‘muddy’, vs. the characteristic twang of a tele. Tone control seemed to have very little, if any, effect.
I figured it was an electronics problem, so I opened it up. This is what a tele is supposed to look like:
Volume on a guitar is controlled by shorting to ground through the volume pot. Tone is controlled by shorting the signal to ground through another pot and a filter cap, in this case .022uF. This filters out some of the high frequencies, changing the sound. Most of the time you don’t want any tone filtering, so you just leave the knob turned up.
This is what I found:
I’m not sure what they were trying to achieve here, but the effect was to completely destroy the sound of the guitar. Sound was filtered through the caps regardless of the tone knob setting. Rewired properly, and the guitar sounds like a tele should. Happy customer. Confused repair guy.
