Blackface Ceramic Signal Cap Upgrade

This is an optional yet VERY effective upgrade.

Replacing a few specific ceramic caps with high quality rolled mylar caps in blackface Fenders improves tone and performance considerably!   You get more clean sustain. More ‘muscle’.  More balls. Less ice pick. More ‘musical’ tone overall. The improvement is remarkable. No joke!

The Ceramic Signal Cap Upgrade for 2 ch amps includes three rolled mylar capacitors to replace three vital ceramic signal caps in these circuits.  One enhances the ‘vibrato’ channel. One enhances the reverb.  And the third, well, the entire preamp signal passes through this cap on the way to the phase inverter.  Upgrading these specific ceramic caps increases clean sustain, harmonic complexity, and overall 'oomph' of the amp, while reducing the 'ice-pick' factor. The reverb also benefits by getting more depth, dimension and detail. We use selected NOS caps for the reverb and PI, and a Jupiter for the vibrato channel enhancement.  

Princeton Reverb kits upgrade TWO ceramic signal caps.  We use two Jupiter caps here.

AB165 Bassman kits also get two caps upgraded, one NOS and one modern production

Two channel non-reverb amps (for the Showman, Dual Showman, Bandmaster and Tremolux) upgrade ONE vital cap, the signal cap feeding the phase inverter, with a most excellent NOS capacitor  

We are NOT talking about the 250pf treble caps and 500pf reverb send ceramics. The original ‘CircleD’ caps sound great there, and are part of the REAL blackface sound. Those stay in. We replace the .02 that the vibrato channel passes through after the tone stack on its way to the reverb mixer, and the .001 that feeds the phase inverter. The entire preamp signal passes through this cap, and the upgrade does wonders.