Hi everyone, OK...first post here goes
I have a Epiphone les Paul Jr, and I've just purchased a DiMarzio Gravity Storm bridge pickup... I've heard that old Gibson Les Paul Jr's had a 500k volume pot and a 250k tone pot, so I'll be looking in putting a Seymour Duncan YJM 500K volume pot and a 250k tone pot, so....
I would first check the value of the existing pots before changing them. They may already be the values you want.
What's the best cap to put on the tone 0.22 or 0.47 etc?
The standard cap value for humbuckers and P90s is 0.022uf (or 22nf respectively 22000pf, sometimes labelled as "223" where the 3 stands for the zeros). Single coils use 0.047uf as standard value, vintage strats 0.1uf. You probably missed one zero in the values you quoted as these would make the tone very very dark with the pot turned down completely.
For me personally, all these values are too large, and I usually use values between 0.0015 and 0.0047uf, depending on guitar and pickups. Caps are quite cheap, get a few different values, experiment and use what you like best.
Also I would like to have a smooth even decrease in volume from 10-0 but still keep all the bass and treble characteristics of the guitar tone at lower volumes, and NOT just lose the volume last min or just loose bass or just loose treble...any help would be much appreciated thanks
Unless you use active pickups where this is a non-issue, this is the most difficult thing to achieve as it depends not only on the pickup and guitar electronics but also on the amp and the cable (yes - the cable has a capacitance which is in parallel to pickups and volume/tone controls). First step is to try the pickup with the existing volume pot and see whether you lose too many highs. If yes, you can add a treble bleed circuit (a small capacitor or a small capacitor in parallel with a resistor - I have also seen a cap and resistor in series for this purpose). The cap alone as treble bleed circuit bypasses the highs so they are always on full, which can make the lows to "disappear" at lower settings. To counteract this you can use a resistor in parallel. Keep in mind that the treble bleed circuit alters the taper of the volume control in the way that there is more signal at lower volume settings than without the treble bleed. In the end, you have to experiment to find what you like. Again, caps and resistors are cheap so get a few of them and experiment.
Good luck with your experiments
Stephan
