The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    That is all amazing info to me - I have never heard of it before so I have some homework to do. Thanks!

    Edit: One question, can I measure capacitance of a cable? Or can I assume that the capacitance of a cable is the same as another unless it is marketed as a low capacitance cable? If it is the same effect of rolling off the tone and using the guitar's tone cap then just getting a normal cable as cheap as possible would make sense but I am wondering if there is a standard capacitance that all cables have unless they are designed for a lower capacitance. If that makes sense...

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    Last edited by rio; 05-03-2017 at 04:19 AM.

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by rio
    One question, can I measure capacitance of a cable? Or can I assume that the capacitance of a cable is the same as another unless it is marketed as a low capacitance cable?
    Yes, it is possible to measure the capacitance of a cable. As an electrical engineer my POV would be that this measurement is not a trivial one, especially with instruments at hand in your household. You need to know what you're doing... Maybe it is easier to consult the producer of your cable, or try to find your cable listed somewhere on the web, e.g. Guitar Cable Capacitance Chart • Comparison of pF Ratings by SHOOTOUT! Guitar Cables UK.

    About the assumption that cable capacitances are generally equal--I would assume: no.

    Robert

  4. #28

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    The best cable seems to be about 50pf per meter and the worst almost 200pf per meter.

    That means, btw, that an average length quality cable has 100 or 200pf, depending on the exact length.

    The tone cap in many guitars is .022 micro (not pico) farad. That's about 22000 pifofarads. The pot is probably audio taper, so I'm not sure how many pf you're adding for each quarter turn (audio taper is not linear).

    But, it wouldn't take a large fraction of that 22000pf to add more capacitance than your cable. Anything more than 1% would do it.

    I'd guess that the average player rolling down his tone control to get a darker sound is adding way more capacitance than a couple of meters of even cheap cable.

    To me, that means the country musician trying to get maximum twang out of a single coil guitar like a tele might find it worthwhile to think about cable capacitance. For those who already roll down the tone control, I'd guess that cheap cable might, at worse, cause you to position the tone pot a bit differently.

    Perhaps the EE's among us will correct me.

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by thelostboss
    :


    While looking for connectors online today I came across this. I don't know if they have been mentioned here before although other Neutrik products have:

    Neutrik NP2RX-TIMBRE Right-Angle 635mm 1/4'' timbrePLUG | SWAMP
    TLB
    Hah, I just came across this myself some days ago and have one on the way to me now Or, I ordered a cable with it from Designacable, as it ended up cheaper than just buying the plug.

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by rio
    If it is the same effect of rolling off the tone and using the guitar's tone cap...
    Rolling off tone is not the same. Cable capacitance shifts the low pass and resonant peak between approx 2-4kHz. Our ears are very sensitive in this area, and shifting a narrow peak within it can be very audible. Rolling off on the tone control doesn't shift this peak/low pass but rather flattens the peak.

    Soo...the cable has an impact that can't be compensated or simulated by controls on your guitar or amp.
    Last edited by Runepune; 05-03-2017 at 09:06 AM.

  7. #31

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    Thanks guys, again, for the info. It is fun learning something new. Considering the sound is different from the cable I think it might be worth exploring.

    Quote Originally Posted by thelostboss
    :


    While looking for connectors online today I came across this. I don't know if they have been mentioned here before although other Neutrik products have:

    Neutrik NP2RX-TIMBRE Right-Angle 635mm 1/4'' timbrePLUG | SWAMP
    TLB
    I can't seem to find any info on this but is this a jack that you have to solder a cable to, a jack that has a 1/4" female plug to plug any cord into or something that has a cord connected to it already? I think I am going to get one to play around with but I'm not sure which of those three things are the case and their FAQ page is showing up blank for me.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

  8. #32

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    Quote Originally Posted by rio
    Thanks guys, again, for the info. It is fun learning something new. Considering the sound is different from the cable I think it might be worth exploring.



    I can't seem to find any info on this but is this a jack that you have to solder a cable to, a jack that has a 1/4" female plug to plug any cord into or something that has a cord connected to it already? I think I am going to get one to play around with but I'm not sure which of those three things are the case and their FAQ page is showing up blank for me.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
    You have to solder it, or get someone to do it for you. I had these guys make me one: 4 Meter Sommer Black and Blue Neutrik Timbre Jack to Gold Mono Jack | Electronics | Designacable

  9. #33
    Wow thank you all for the great responses!!

  10. #34

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    Quote Originally Posted by Runepune
    Rolling off tone is not the same. Cable capacitance shifts the low pass and resonant peak between approx 2-4kHz. Our ears are very sensitive in this area, and shifting a narrow peak within it can be very audible. Rolling off on the tone control doesn't shift this peak/low pass but rather flattens the peak.

    Soo...the cable has an impact that can't be compensated or simulated by controls on your guitar or amp.
    How does this work?

    If you roll off the tone control, basically you are allowing some of your signal to pass through the capacitor to ground. Caps pass high frequencies, so it amounts to a treble roll-off.

    Your cable has some capacitance, which means some of your signal can be passed to ground within the cable.

    The only difference is that, in the tone control, there's also a resistor. Is that what you're saying changes the resonance? I looked for evidence on the internet and couldn't find anything about the difference between the effect of cable capacitance vs. tone control capacitance.

    If you're right, it would suggest that you could duplicate the effect of the cable by soldering in a capacitor of equal picofarads between the pickup output and ground, with no resistor (that is, no pot). This may be what the old Gibson varitone did.

    If there's website that shows the results of measuring these things, please post the link.

    One thing I know for certain is that I can't hear any difference between cables, but I usually roll off some treble and I play humbuckers which are less bright than single coils to begin with. Would I hear the difference with a Tele -- between adding capacitance with a cheap cable vs. adding capacitance with my tone control? My guess is that I'd end up turning the tone pot until the guitar sounded good to me and end up in the same place without regard to cable capacitance.

    One other point: the material I saw which advocates for the advantages of boutique cable were all sellers. The money-neutral websites didn't find any meaningful differences. If anybody has a Consumer Reports type study on it -- please post a link.

  11. #35

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    Yes, how much of an effect the cable has depends on the guitar curcuitry, it's output impedance and the amp's' input impedance. Cable's are often of similar lengths and capacitance too, so it can be hard to spot. But you will definitely hear the difference between a short low capacitance cable and a long high capacitance one! And definitely in a Tele. Shifting that peak around sounds very different from reducing it.

    I'm no EE so I can only speculate The resistance in the tone pot, it's fixed cap value...versus the varying capacitance of the cable. There's a German page here...I don't read German, but there's Google Translate, and the graphs are somewhat self-explanatory. The tone control low passes the peak away...and at the very end it actually adds a peak again way down in the mids:



    Die Klangeinstellung in der Elektrogitarre

    A graph of cable capacitance effect:



    BuildYourGuitar.com :: The Secrets of Electric Guitar Pickups

    I just got the Neutrik TIMBRE cable in the mail today. The effect is actually too severe for me. I wish they'd have used lower cap values. The first position is fine and useable, but the other two is so severe they make sigle coils into dark humbuckers

  12. #36

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    [QUOTE=rpjazzguitar;769542]How does this work?

    If you roll off the tone control, basically you are allowing some of your signal to pass through the capacitor to ground. Caps pass high frequencies, so it amounts to a treble roll-off.

    I found a website which said this. The capacitor value in the tone control matters because it determines the frequency where the roll-off occurs. The pot determines the proportion of the signal which is subject to that roll-off frequency.

    This is what the Varitone was doing. Instead of rolling off varying fractions of your signal at a fixed frequency, it changed the frequency of the roll off.

    So, you're right. The capacitance in the cable will roll off treble at a different point than the capacitor in the tone control (if the two don't have the same value, which is what occurs in a standard setup).

    But, it seems to me that rolling the treble back at the tone control will be adding so much capacitance, compared to the cable, that the cable is likely to have no audible effect. That's because the frequency at which it starts rolling off treble is already mostly gone -- having been rolled off in the tone control.

    Does that make sense?

    And, thanks, I never really understood the impact of the capacitor value until today.

    Is it possible that a smaller value tone control capacitor could brighten a guitar's sound, even with the pot all the way up? That is, there would be a lot of resistance in series with the capacitor, so that a very small percentage of the current would be routed to ground.

  13. #37

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    The cap value being so much higher doesn't matter as long as there's an audible portion of the signal not being passed through it. Depends how high that resonant peak is in your setup. If you have the tone control dialled far back I guess the shifting peak/lo pass from the cable won't matter much. But I have to dial it almost to the end to not hear it on the guitar I'm trying now.

    Is it possible that a smaller value tone control capacitor could brighten a guitar's sound, even with the pot all the way up?
    Don't know, but I doubt it

  14. #38

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    The math gets complicated.

    If you roll back the tone control part way, you're still passing a portion of your signal to the amp without it going through the tone cap in the guitar.

    That portion of the signal is then subject to the roll-off of the cable. So, mathematically, the cable capacitance has to matter.

    What would you hear?

    Well, we know that the tone control darkens the sound.

    Now, we're going to pass that darkened sound through two cables -- one with about 50pf per meter and another with about 200pf.

    They both pass some highs to ground, with the 50pf doing that at a higher frequency.

    With the tone control rolled off, you're sending less signal, on average, at that higher frequency to the amp. So, the 50k would be rolling off something that had already been rolled off -- not to zero, but part way.

    The question is, would you be able to hear the difference between the 50 and 200pf cables -- after you have already rolled off a bunch of treble in the guitar?

    I'm certain that, for me, the answer is absolutely not. That's because I don't hear any difference between cables even with the tone control full up. But, I have high frequency hearing loss, so maybe that's it. My understand is that blindfold tests tend to agree with the side of the argument that there's no difference, but maybe somebody can post a money-neutral analysis that concludes otherwise.

  15. #39

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    What about wireless systems for guitar. Do those have capacitance? Any measurable effect on tone?

  16. #40

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    Now, we're going to pass that darkened sound through two cables -- one with about 50pf per meter and another with about 200pf.

    They both pass some highs to ground, with the 50pf doing that at a higher frequency.


    The two cables are not separate. They add up to a total capacitance in parallell in the guitar-amp circuit (and if they're connected with a stomp, any cable length after the stomp won't be in that circuit...unless it's a bypassed true bypass stomp )

    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar

    The question is, would you be able to hear the difference between the 50 and 200pf cables -- after you have already rolled off a bunch of treble in the guitar?
    Depends on what you mean by "bunch"

    You hear this though? They are two cables of mine, low and high capacitance:

    With humbucker


    With single coil


    This is with the tone control up though. But in the humbucker clip you'll hear that, in addition to the lost treble, the mids are a bit more prominent due to the downward shifted peak.


    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    What about wireless systems for guitar. Do those have capacitance? Any measurable effect on tone?
    Wireless systems made for guitar often adds capacitance (or simulation of it...I dunno). E.g. the Line 6 series.

  17. #41

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    Hey Zane!

    I play an ES-335 as well. Something you should absolutely try is keeping your volume knob around 2-4 and getting more volume from your amp. As your guitar volume increases you naturally get a brighter sound, but when more of that volume is coming from the amp it stays darker.

    David