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Capacitors
Basically Capacitors alter tone, if wired up directly (with no potentiometer) they remove the high frequency's working at 100% , Large capacitors remove more highs than smaller ones, so a .047 cap will remove more high frequencys than a .022 capacitor.
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Tone Potentiometers
Tone pots basically Vary the amount of treble that gets 'bled off' which is usefull if you want to alter the tone slightly, it is possible to make the sound darker by turning the tone pot.
If your tone pots sound noisey (scratchy sound) when you turn them it is time to spray them with wd40 to clean them out.
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Varitone
a Varitone Rotary Switch is a rotary switch that has set posistions (commonly 5-6-12), different size capacitors are soldered to the lugs on the switch and then wired into the guitar, this is good because it has a lot of selection for different capacitors (and a clean setting with no cap, if desired), but it is also flawed because when wired into the circuit each tone cap will work at 100% and be very dark.
Some suitable Capacitors
1= bypass (no cap)
2= 0.0022 µF
3= 0.01 µF
4= 0.039 µF
5= 0.047 µF
6= 0.1 µF
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Custom Wiring (combing everything)
It is possible to combine all these things (varitone and a tone pot) to get the best of both worlds, in my diagram i will use a strat as an example, it has 1 master tone control, 1 volume control, 1 varitone knob to select which capacitor.
heres some crazy wiring using 6 pickups (that cant be mixed) in series using a 4pdt switch to swap pickups and then 3 on/off switches into a master volume with the varitone running into that.
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