Treble bypasses in guitar volume pots

[midwayfair]

Lollar claims that the treble bypass cuts bass:

How do I keep the treble from bleeding off when I roll the volume down?

For Gibson type wiring use the 57 Les Paul custom wiring schematic included in the installation instructions or on my website. You can adapt this to fenders with a little creative adjustment. I do not recommend using a volume bypass capacitor. If you have one on your fender—it's usually a very small cap and resistor located between two of the lugs on the volume control pot. Treble bypass caps roll off the bass and accent the treble as soon as you roll off the volume. The more you roll off the more it sounds like you are playing through a little tin can. This scheme can also degrade the bass and volume when the volume is all the way up if it is leaking. I have had many times where someone called me commenting the pickups sound trebly and weak. Once they got rid of the volume bypass cap the pickups sounded fuller and stronger to an amazing extent. I recommend that you never use that, instead put a smaller tone cap on—fenders use .047, try a .022 which can really improve the volume and tone control action and if needed rewire it to look more like the 57 LP custom schematic.

I was under the impression that a treble bypass simply allowed some frequencies to pass directly to the output, but this seems to imply that there is actual frequency loss, even at max volume.

I've been using the Kinman treble bypass, which is a 120K and 22nF in series on lugs 1 and 2 of a strat's pot. It sounds the same to me at all volume levels.

My brain tells me Lollar's simply mistating what's going on here and that it only applies to cap-only treble bypasses and not cap + resistor bypasses (with the cap only, if we turn down the volume and there's more treble left, then of course it sounds like there's less bass ...). But my gut tells me that Lollar doesn't BS people and that this is his business and he ought to know it.

Maybe someone here can explain the filtering better to me.

[madbean]

I think the key here is he states that it can cause loss if the cap itself is leaky. So, yes, I can see that being the case but not at the max volume because the cap is shorted at that point. Maybe a shorted, leaky cap can cause treble or bass loss, I don't know.

I've done a couple treble bleed caps on Strats...usually a small ceramic, but no parallel or series resistor. I can kind of take it or leave it.

I do use 22n for all my tone caps. It's the perfect range for my ears.