Sprague Black Beauty
Let's look at the different tone caps to make it easier for you to make the right choice. Knowing the correct value makes the process even easier and less expensive, because you can buy one cap of each type to try them out. Imagine buying all available caps in all values – the time and money saved is worth spending some time with our cardboard chart!
There are no hard and fast rules as to what cap to use – there are no good or bad ones. "Good" is what you like; if super-cheap, 2-cent mini ceramic caps sound good to your ears, there is no problem with that. I've seen some odd things inside guitars over the years, so experiment. One general rule to follow, however, is to use standard, non-polarized film and foil caps. Polarized electrolytic caps don't sound very good as a tone cap.
Some tone caps seem to be more common than others, so I've prepared a guide to these. Most of the information is based on my experiences or advice from customers. If you have any special questions about tone caps, feel free to contact me.
Sprague "Black Beauties"
These, together with the "Bumblebee" caps, are definitely the most discussed caps, with an almost magical touch to them. They are usually from the late fifties or early sixties and can be found in a lot of guitars from that era. They are famous for their use in '58 and '59 (Burst) Les Pauls, and some say that they are responsible for the magical tone of those guitars. The Black Beauties can be found with red and yellow print, and the 400 and 600 volt types are the ones most often found inside guitars from that time.
These caps tend to dampen some high-end, making the tone softer, smoother, warmer or sweeter. The bass frequencies are also smoothed out, providing familiar sounds from recordings of that era. These caps are for those looking for the old vintage Les Paul tone, and they can be found at NOS or used on eBay. The only replicas I know of are from LUXE, but keep in mind that these replicas will sound different, like newer bumblebee caps. If you want to use the vintage caps, make sure that you use vintage cloth wire inside your guitar and the Gibson fifties vintage wiring, otherwise you will not fully experience the tones from these caps.
"Bumblebee" caps
The bumblebee caps are very similar to the Black Beauties, and the origin of the nickname is pretty easy to see. You can also find these caps inside late-fifties Les Pauls and other guitars from that era, and they are definitely the most famous tone caps. Everything written about Black Beauties applies equally to bumblebee caps. Replicas are available from LUXE, Crazy Parts, and singlecoil.com.
One thing to be aware of is the Gibson "replicas" from their Historic series. These caps only look like bumblebees; I x-rayed and also opened some of them, and inside there is a cheap, standard film cap, masked with a Bumblebee cover.
"Tropical Fish" caps
These caps are called "tropical fish" because of the colored stripes that look a bit like a tropical fish. The "tropical fish" are often mixed up with the "bumblebee" caps, but this is simply wrong. You can find the tropical fish caps mostly inside old vintage stompboxes, wah pedals and amps, but they can also be found inside some guitars. I really like these as tone caps because they offer a very fat tone, without turning the tone into mud. These caps are no longer in production, so you can find them on eBay or from vintage parts dealers. R.G. Keen from Visual Sound investigated these caps and found that they are standard film caps that are just painted funny -- very similar to the cheap "Greenies" from Xicon, so give them a try.
"Flat Disc" (ceramic) caps
These are the old "high voltage" ceramic disk caps from Sprague or Erie that are found in almost every vintage Fender guitar. You can also find them inside old stompboxes and amps. They sound very different from modern ceramic caps and add a special flavor to the tone. If you are looking for a typical sixties vintage Fender tone, you should try these caps. From time to time, you can find originals on eBay, and replicas are available from LUXE. Another option is to get some consumer electronic devices from this era, like old TVs, radios, etc., and cannibalize from there. Often you can find them for free!
Sprague "Orange Drop" caps
These caps are still available today from Sprague/Vishay and can be found in some high-quality guitars from PRS or Gibson. You can find old Sprague Orange Drops in a lot of old Fender guitars. The higher voltage values can also be found inside high-quality amps today, as well as in a lot of vintage Fender amps. This is another tone cap that I really like; it's very transparent and tends to pronounce the mid frequencies a bit. A lot of our customers choose these caps for Fender guitars of all kinds. Old ones are available on eBay and new ones are available in almost every local electronic store. Don't skip trying these caps!
Mallory caps
Mallory caps have a tubular shape and yellow color. You can find these caps in a lot of amps, and also inside guitars as tone caps. These caps have a great fat and punchy sound, pronouncing the mid frequencies while keeping the treble alive. This is the ideal tone cap for rock guys, and a lot of our customers choose them for their Les Pauls and SGs. They also sound great inside Fender guitars, and Leo Fender put these caps inside all of his "Music Man" amps, manufactured exclusively for him by the Plessi company. This is a good overall tone cap, and a great place to start; it seems to work well with both humbuckers and single coils. You can buy these caps new from a lot of companies.
Silver Mica caps
These caps have a typical "hump" in the middle of the body and can be found inside high-quality amps and stompboxes. They can also used as a hi-cut cap on the volume pot and, if you can find the correct value, also as a cap for the tone control. Higher values are often hard to find, large and very expensive, but still worth a try. They really sound excellent, without any coloration of the tone.
Styroflex caps
Styroflex caps are easy to identify because of their tubular shape and transparent housing. These caps are typical caps from the fifties and you can find them inside almost every radio and TV from the era. Some companies still make them today, and they're one of my favorite tone caps for maximum transparency of tone with absolutely no coloration. I prefer Styroflex caps inside semi-acoustic guitars and jazz boxes. You can find them on eBay, usually as assorted sets of different values, but they are also available from some companies out of actual production runs.
Oil-Paper caps
These caps from companies like Jensen can be found in high-end HIFI gear, as well as in high-quality guitar amps. They are very expensive but a lot of players swear by them. You can use them inside guitars if you have enough space for them; I tried them a while ago, and they sounded very similar to the Silver Mica and Styroflex caps -- definitely not a bad reference.
There are a lot more caps out there, like the Vitamin Q, Mustard caps and many others, however I think this is a good overview to help you choose which ones to try. Caps sound very different from one another, and they really affect the overall tone of the guitar – even with the tone pot fully opened. Remember, there is no right or wrong, it is simply a matter of individual taste. Don't be afraid to try cheap or historically incorrect caps with "incorrect" values; I never use the factory stock values, as I find them to be way too much. I prefer values from 3300 up to 6800pF, which makes the tone control much more useable. You can also mix up different types and values in one guitar; I have a Strat with a 6800pF Mallory cap for the bridge pickup only and a 3300pF Mallory cap for the middle and neck pickups together. Feel free to experiment and let your ears decide!
Next month we will get back to doing some guitar mods, this time discussing the wiring inside your axes.
[Updated 11/23/21]
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English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock is as recognizable by tone, lyrics, and his vibrantly hued clothing choices as the sound of Miles Davis’ horn.
Itchycoo Park
“I like my songs, but I don’t necessarily think I’m the best singer of them,” he effaces to me over Zoom, as it’s approaching midnight where he’s staying in London. “I just wanted to be a singer-songwriter because that’s what Bob Dylan did. And I like to create; I’m happiest when I’m producing something. But my records are blueprints, really. They just show you what the song could be, but they’re not necessarily the best performance of them. Whereas if you listen to … oh, I don’t know, the great records of ’67, they actually sound like the best performances you could get.”
He mentions that particular year not offhandedly, but because that’s the theme of the conversation: He’s just released an album, 1967: Vacations in the Past, which is a collection of covers of songs released in 1967, and one original song—the title track. Boasting his takes on Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” and Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” among eight other tracks, it serves as a sort of soundtrack or musical accompaniment to his new memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.
Hitchcock, who was 14 years old and attending boarding school in England in 1967, describes how who he is today is encased in that period of his life, much like a mosquito in amber. But why share that with the world now?
In the mid ’70s, before he launched his solo career, Hitchcock was the leader of the psychedelic group the Soft Boys.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
“I’m 71; I’ve been alive quite a long time,” he shares. “If I want to leave a record of anything apart from all the songs I’ve written, now is a good time to do it. By writing about 1966 to ’67, I’m basically giving the context for Robyn Hitchcock, as Robyn Hitchcock then lived the rest of his life.”
Hopefully, I say, the publication of these works won’t ring as some sort of death knell for him.
“Well, it’s a relative death knell,” he replies. “But everyone’s on the conveyor belt. We all go over the edge. And none of our legacies are permanent. Even the plastic chairs and Coke bottles and stuff like that that we’re leaving behind.... In 10- or 20-thousand-years’ time, we’ll probably just be some weird, scummy layer on the great fruitcake of the Earth. But I suppose you do probably get to an age where you want to try and explain yourself, maybe to yourself. Maybe it’s me that needs to read the book, you know?”
“I’m basically giving the context for Robyn Hitchcock, as Robyn Hitchcock then lived the rest of his life.”
To counter his description of his songs above, I would say that Hitchcock’s performances on 1967: Vacations in the Past carve out their own deserved little planet in the vintage-rock Milky Way. I was excited in particular by some of his selections: the endorsement of foundational prog in the Procol Harum cover; the otherwise forgotten Traffic tune, “No Face, No Name and No Number,” off of Mr. Fantasy, the Mamas & the Papas’ nostalgic “San Francisco,” and of course, the aforementioned Floyd single. There’s also the lesser known “My White Bicycle” by Tomorrow and “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” by the Move, and the Hendrix B-side, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.”
Through these recordings, Hitchcock pays homage to “that lovely time when people were inventing new strands of music, and they couldn’t define them,” he replies. “People didn’t really know what to call Pink Floyd. Was it jazz, or was it pop, or psychedelia, or freeform, or systems music?”
His renditions call to mind a cooking reduction, defined by Wikipedia as “the process of thickening and intensifying the flavor of a liquid mixture, such as a soup, sauce, wine, or juice, by simmering or boiling.” Hitchcock’s distinctive, classic folk-singer voice and steel-string-guided arrangements do just that to this iconic roster. There are some gentle twists and turns—Eastern-instrumental touches; subtly applied, ethereal delay and reverb, and the like—but nothing that should cloud the revived conduit to the listener’s memory of the originals.
And yet, here’s his review of his music, in general: “I hear [my songs] back and I think, ‘God, my voice is horrible! This is just … ugh! Why do I sing through my nose like that?’ And the answer is because Bob Dylan sang through his nose, you know. I was just singing through Bob Dylan’s nose, really.”
1967: Vacations in the Pastfeatures 11 covers of songs that were released in 1967, and one original song—the title track.
❦
“I wait for songs to come to me: They’re independent like cats, rather than like dogs who will faithfully trail you everywhere,” Hitchcock explains, sharing about his songwriting process. “All I can do is leave a plate of food out for the songs—in the form of my open mind—and hope they will appear in there, hungry for my neural pathways.”
Once he’s domesticated the wild idea, he says, “It’s important to remain as unselfconscious as possible in the [writing] process. If I start worrying about composing the next line, the embryonic song slips away from me. Often I’m left with a verse-and-a-half and an unresolved melody because my creation has lost its innocence and fled from my brain.
“[Then] there are times when creativity itself is simply not what’s called for: You just have to do some more living until the songs appear again. That’s as close as I can get to describing the process, which still, thankfully, remains mysterious to me after all this time.”
“In 10- or 20-thousand-years’ time, we’ll probably just be some weird, scummy layer on the great fruitcake of the Earth.”
In the prose of 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Hitchcock expresses himself similarly to how he does so distinctively in his lyrics and speech. Amidst his tales of roughing his first experiences in the infamously ruthless environs of English boarding school, he shares an abundance of insight about his parents and upbringing, as well as a self-diagnosis of having Asperger’s syndrome—whose name is now gradually becoming adapted in modern lexicon to “low-support-needs” autism spectrum disorder. When I touch on the subject, he reaffirms the observation, and elaborates, “I think I probably am also OCD, whatever that means. I’ve always been obsessed with trying to get things in the right order.”
He relates an anecdote about his school days: “So, if I got out of lunch—‘Yippee! I’ve got three hours to dress like a hippie before they put me back in my school clothes. Oh damn, I’ve put the purple pants on, but actually, I should put the red ones on. No! I put the red ones on; it’s not good—I’ll put my jeans on.’
Robyn Hitchcock's Gear
Hitchcock in 1998, after embarking on the tour behind one of his earlier acoustic albums, Moss Elixir.
Guitars
- Two Fylde Olivia acoustics equipped with Sennheiser II lavalier mics (for touring)
- Larrivée acoustic
- Fender Telecaster
- Fender Stratocaster
Strings & Picks
- Elixir .011–.052 (acoustic)
- Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom .010–.054 (electric)
- Dunlop 1.0 mm
“I’d just get into a real state. And then the only thing that would do would be listening to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. There was something about Trout Mask that was so liberating that I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t care what trousers I’m wearing. This is just, whoa! This music is it.’”
With him having chosen to cover “See Emily Play,” a Syd Barrett composition, the conversation soon turns to the topic of the late, troubled songwriter. I comment, “It’s hard to listen to Syd’s solo records.... It’s weird that people enabled that. You can hear him losing his mind.”
“You can, but at the same time, the fact they enabled it means that these things did come out,” Robyn counters. “And he obviously had nothing else to give after that. So, at least, David Gilmour and the old Floyd guys.... It meant they gave the world those songs, which, although the performances are quite … rickety, quite fragile, they’re incredibly beautiful songs. There’s nothing forced about Barrett. He can only be himself.”
“There was something about Trout Mask Replica that was so liberating that I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t care what trousers I’m wearing. This is just, whoa!’”
I briefly compare Barrett to singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston, and we agree there are some similarities. And then with a segue, ask, “When did you first fall in love with the guitar? Was it when you came home from boarding school and found the guitar your parents gifted you on your bed?”
Robyn pauses thoughtfully.“Ah, I think I liked the idea of the guitar probably around that time,” he shares. “I always used to draw men with guns. I’m not really macho, but I had a very kind of post-World War II upbringing where men were always carrying guns. And I thought, ‘Well, if he’s a man, he’s got to carry a gun.’ Then, around the age of 13, I swapped the gun for the guitar. And then every man I drew was carrying a guitar instead.”
Elaborating on getting his first 6-string, he says, “I had lessons from a man who had three fingers bent back from an industrial accident. He was a nice old man with whiskers, and he showed me how to get the guitar in tune and what the basic notes were. And then I got hold of a Bob Dylan songbook, and—‘Oh my gosh, I can play “Mr. Tambourine Man!”’ It was really fast—about 10 minutes between not being able to play anything, and suddenly being able to play songs by my heroes.”
❦
Hitchcock does me the kindness, during our atypically deep conversation—at least, for a press interview—of sharing more acute perceptions of his parents, and their own neurodivergence. Ultimately, he feels that his mother didn’t necessarily like him, but loved the idea of him—and that later in life, he came to better understand his lonely, depressive father. “My mother was protective but in an oddly cold way. People are like that,” he shares. “We just contain so many things that don’t make sense with each other: colors that you would not mix as a painter; themes you would not intermingle as a writer; characters you would not create.... We defy any sense of balance or harmony.
“Although the performances are quite rickety, quite fragile, they’re incredibly beautiful songs. There’s nothing forced about Barrett. He can only be himself.”
“The idea of normality.... ‘Normal’ is tautological,” he continues. “Nothing is normal. A belief in normality is an aberration. It’s a form of insanity, I think.
“It’s just hard for us to accept ourselves because we’re brought up with the myth of normality, and the myth of what people are supposed to be like gender-wise, sex-wise, and psychologically what we’re supposed to want. And in a way, some of that’s beginning to melt, now. But that probably just causes more confusion. It’s no wonder people like me want to live in 1967.”
YouTube It
In this excerpt from the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film of Robyn Hitchcock, Storefront Hitchcock, the songwriter performs an absurdist “upbeat” song about a man who dies of cancer.
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