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Post subject: What is grease bucket tone circuitry?
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 8:17 pm
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I'm looking at a Fender Strat body that has greasebucket tone circuitry. What is this? Is the wiring different or have some resistors or caps been added to the wiring or what?


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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 8:48 pm
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The grease bucket circut is a design in which they have a Cap and a Resister added to each pot. The purpose of the resistor is to lower the load and make the pickups more powerful but still maintain a ground so that some highs still bleed through to ground, by doing that you keep the sound from being to bright.

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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 9:42 pm
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The fender web site describes it as a tone circuit 'rolling off the highs without adding bass'

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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:09 pm
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bss wrote:
The fender web site describes it as a tone circuit 'rolling off the highs without adding bass'


+1


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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:19 pm
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bss wrote:
The fender web site describes it as a tone circuit 'rolling off the highs without adding bass'

Yep and each tone pot has a .1uf and .02uf cap plus a 1/4watt 4.7 resistor which is the real important thing because of how it controls the ground to allow the highs to roll off, but reduces the load on the pickup. It makes the pots like an ALMOST! no load pot. Notice I said almost the metal film resistor still allows some load by keeping the ground .

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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:46 pm
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This circuit effects the way the tone knob rolls off the highs so that there is no increase in low end frequencies, correct?

Does it make a difference when rolling back the volume knob also or only the tone knobs?

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Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 11:07 pm
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bss wrote:
This circuit effects the way the tone knob rolls off the highs so that there is no increase in low end frequencies, correct?

Does it make a difference when rolling back the volume knob also or only the tone knobs?

Yes what it is doing is allowing you to control the highs by letting them bleed thru to ground and does not add bass in doing so.

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:11 am
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I noticed the new American Standard Telecaster has Master Delta Tone™ (“Delta Tone” system includes high output bridge pickup and special No-Load tone control)...
So is this the same or similar circuit as the hwy1 Greasebucket™ Tone Circuit with a different name?

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:51 am
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bss wrote:
The fender web site describes it as a tone circuit 'rolling off the highs without adding bass'


I've never understood that description from Fender. A plain old tone circuit does exactly that. It rolls off the highs without adding bass. It just opens up the signal to a capacitor through a pot. The capacitor preferentially passes highs to ground. The lows stick around better. No lows are added. You can't "add" anything without active circuitry.

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 9:55 am
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bss wrote:
I noticed the new American Standard Telecaster has Master Delta Tone™ (“Delta Tone” system includes high output bridge pickup and special No-Load tone control)...
So is this the same or similar circuit as the hwy1 Greasebucket™ Tone Circuit with a different name?


Deltatone takes the tone pot out of the signal chain completely when rotated clockwise to the stop.

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 10:19 am
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soggycrow wrote:
I've never understood that description from Fender. A plain old tone circuit does exactly that. It rolls off the highs without adding bass. It just opens up the signal to a capacitor through a pot. The capacitor preferentially passes highs to ground. The lows stick around better. No lows are added. You can't "add" anything without active circuitry.


Exactly. No passive tone control "Adds Bass"

And I have to disagree about the resistor being the magic here. People get this confused with a treble bleed for a volume control because there is a cap across the lugs, but it's not the same at all.

All that does is prevent you from completely grounding out that side of the caps. Normally there is a noticeable change when your tone control goes from 1 to 0 (when you go to ground) and it's usually too muddy and not useable. All they are doing with the resistor is (in a way) making 0 1.

What the grease bucket is doing here is sending more and more signal to a second cap in series as you turn the tone down. This changes the cutoff/rolloff frequency as you turn down the tone knob (moving it up). This effectively gives you sharper cutoff as the tone is turned down. It's like changing the cap to a lower value as you turn down the tone control.

-Eddie


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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 4:33 pm
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eddie_bowers wrote:
soggycrow wrote:
I've never understood that description from Fender. A plain old tone circuit does exactly that. It rolls off the highs without adding bass. It just opens up the signal to a capacitor through a pot. The capacitor preferentially passes highs to ground. The lows stick around better. No lows are added. You can't "add" anything without active circuitry.


Exactly. No passive tone control "Adds Bass"

And I have to disagree about the resistor being the magic here. People get this confused with a treble bleed for a volume control because there is a cap across the lugs, but it's not the same at all.

All that does is prevent you from completely grounding out that side of the caps. Normally there is a noticeable change when your tone control goes from 1 to 0 (when you go to ground) and it's usually too muddy and not useable. All they are doing with the resistor is (in a way) making 0 1.

What the grease bucket is doing here is sending more and more signal to a second cap in series as you turn the tone down. This changes the cutoff/rolloff frequency as you turn down the tone knob (moving it up). This effectively gives you sharper cutoff as the tone is turned down. It's like changing the cap to a lower value as you turn down the tone control.

-Eddie

Yes thats the idea of the resistor to always have a controled amount of ground. And the higher cap has a darker sound because its cutting back a wider range of signal and the smaller cap is making the signal sound brighter. Working togerher you are not getting the muddy signal. Rolling off the highs and not making it sound bassier.

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 6:49 pm
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How do I remove this "greasebucket circuitry"? Can I simply desolder all the resistors and caps attached to the pots and then it will be a normal Strat?

Or would it have to be re-wired as well?


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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 9:01 pm
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357mag wrote:
How do I remove this "greasebucket circuitry"? Can I simply desolder all the resistors and caps attached to the pots and then it will be a normal Strat? Or would it have to be re-wired as well?


As with another thread, suppose you just get yourself another prewired pickguard that suits your needs.

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Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:49 am
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357mag wrote:
How do I remove this "greasebucket circuitry"? Can I simply desolder all the resistors and caps attached to the pots and then it will be a normal Strat?

Or would it have to be re-wired as well?


You could get 90% of a standard tone control by simply moving the hot lead from the outside lug to the center lug. The only difference then would be the extra 4.7k of resistance, but unless you commonly turn the tone to 0, you wont know the difference between 250k and 254.7k

Otherwise you can also remove the resistor and solder the resistor end of that cap to the pot case.

-Eddie


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