Welcome back to another edition of Tone Circuit Fun! Last week we covered a neat mod that actually creates a Bass Cut knob for you guitar. This week we’ll be going over a really interesting mod that we like to call, the “Grease Bucket Mod”. Despite the name for this mod, it doesn’t actually make your tone filthier, if anything it can actually help clean up your sound.

Instead of just cutting out any treble frequencies to the ground, this circuit mod acts more as a band-pass filter by allowing specific frequencies through, and not just throwing a blanket over your tone. It’s actually a relatively simple procedure, and if you read my last article about turning your tone knob into a bass-cut, then you’re already a third of the way there.

Required Supplies :

  • A soldering iron
  • Solder
  • 1×0.0015uf capacitor
  • 1x preferred value tone cap, or whatever is already there will work (I’ll use a 0.047uf for this example)
  • 1x resistor with a value of 4.7k
  • 1 tone pot to modify

Instructions :

I’m going to start this guide on the assumption that there is no tone pot actually wired up, so we’ll go through it step-by-step to reduce the amount of confusion. 

(These mods require basic soldering knowledge. If you don’t have any experience in this I’d recommend reading our article called “Guitar Soldering for Beginners”.)

1. The first step will be to wire up one leg of the 0.0015uf capacitor to the middle lug of the potentiometer, and then wire other leg to one of the outer lugs of the potentiometer. This will act as one half of the filter by sending some of the bass frequencies to ground.

2. The second step is to wire the 4.7k resistor and the 0.047uf cap (or whatever you decided to go with) in series – neither of these parts are directional so essentially all you need to do is wrap one leg of the capacitor around one leg of the resistor and solder them. This will create a tone cap that acts a bit like a treble bleed so it will cut some of the high frequencies, but also allow some through. This really helps to clean up some of the signal.

3. The third step is to take the resistor/capacitor you just wired in series and connect the capacitor side to the last open lug on the potentiometer. Then, wire the resistor side to the back of the potentiometer’s casing so that it’s grounded and can act like a regular tone knob. Now, this “tone knob” acts as a band-pass filter instead of a simple bass or treble cut and best of all it’s all passive and takes just a few easy steps.

That’s how you wire up a “Grease Bucket”  tone circuit – which is just a fancy marketing term for ‘band-pass’ knob.

I hope this article was helpful, or at least interesting! If you enjoy modding, check out another guide of ours called 3 Easy Humbucker Hacks! If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out some more. We upload articles, review, guides, and more every day!

This article was written  by Keegan Connor, our editor located in Canada.

 

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