Vintage cable simulator circuit

[Nasse]

http://goran.tangring.com/index-filer/Pickup-cabletheory.htm

Found this cool article and circuit when surfing the net. May be useful when trying to get clean Stratocaster treble setting in pocket. Whaddyaya think?

[aron]

I think it's true.

My friend has been saying this for years and he uses a curly cable.

Yep, that box should work.

[Peter Snowberg]

I've heard that a 20 or 30 foot curley cord was part of the Hendrix tonal mojo.

Take care,
-Peter

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

I know there is plenty of capacitance in cables, because I find breaks by measuring the cap at each end with a multimeter!

[ampman50]

Right on.  Bill Lawrence (the pickup guru) says the same thing on his site.
Hendrix used a coiled cord with 3300 pF of capacitance which contributed greatly to his stage sound. In the studio he used a low capacitance cable.

[brett]

Very interesting idea.  And I thought my friend with the 30 foot cable (seriously!) wasn't quite right in the head.  Now I want to A/B my lead with his.

[Fret Wire]

I've heard the same Hendrix stories. Roger Mayer was supposedly one of the first techs out there to understand all that stuff.

[idlefaction]

looking at the theory there, i'd prefer to have a sound with a larger mid hump.  so i'd want more capacitance to bring the 8kHz peak down to 2.5kHz, and a high input impedance.

thats funny cos i really like the sound of my rangemaster with low input impedance cos it gives me a mid hump!  must be more to it than just that i think.

[petemoore]

Would the cap necessarily have to be on the guitar? could it be placed at the input of the first efkt?
 Seems like it would be pretty easy to put a cap to ground at the input jack.
 Wouldn't this just roloff highs by shunting them to ground?
 Seems so simple that more ppl would have figured to use this more often...it does sound 'that' cool that I'd want to try it out...
 I use Monster Rock Cables. I definitely noticed a large difference when I replaced all my many cables with these. Noticably more signal and more highs. Still gets the 'cable flopping on the floor' sound...lol..which I was hoping they would help eliminate more of at the time....mainly noticable when slapped on  linolium or cement.

[Mark Hammer]

Always use the best damn cable you can.  That way, you are assured of minimal breakage, excellent shielding, and that your tone will not depend on whether the cord/cable is coiled up, stretched out of whatnot.  All the curly cord voodoo makes sense at one level, but the problem is that it depends on cords that are substandard in so many other ways.

I've said it before and will say it again.

1) Tone control caps are generally poorly chosen.  We haven't changed much since 1950 and the reason is generally the dead weight of precedent not the fact that we found something that works great.  (Many of you have probably gotten the e-mail linking the width of horse buttocks in ancient Rome and the size of the O-rings on the ill-fated space shuttle by now...same thing)

2) Your rear pickup tone cap should be different than your front one since you want different resonances from each pickup anyways - that's why you HAVE them.

3) You can easily create different resonances by sticking small-value caps between hot and ground at the volume-control input.  Indeed, this is what the little adaptor box linked-to shows.  The easiest way to do this is to wire up a 1M tone control on your guitar where the two outside lugs go to different-value caps to ground (I like .015 and .0047, but others work fine) and the wiper goes to the hot/input lug on your volume control.  Rotate one way and you get one resonance. Rotate the other and you get a different one.

Although the switch box seems like an elegant solution, note that the caps WILL pop in the absense of a continuous path to ground.  A smarter idea is to stick a bunch of them in series, with terminating resistors at the beginning and end of the chain of caps, and use the rotary switch to successively shunt off more and more caps.  The effective capacitance (C) of the series combination is given by 1/Ca+1/Cb+.....1/Cn = 1/C.  This will produce a pop-free arrangement.

You can do the same thing with your on-board tone-control too.  Using the bi-directional thing I described above, leave one side/rotation as the sort of "stock/classic" tone control, and wire up the other one with a 6800pf, 6800pf, and 4700pf cap in series.  When they are all in a row, they yield a series capacitance of around 2000pf.  Shunt different combinations and you get different effective capacitance values (e.g., just 6800 and 4700pf in series gets you about 2800pf, a pair of 6800pf caps in series gets you 3400pf).  A simple 3-position on-off-on SPDT centre-off toggle will accomplish this shunting nicely.

This will allow one end of the tone pot to mimic a tone-up-full-with-old-cable tone.  Under those sorts of conditions, it may be smart to use a log tone pot so that the function with the large-value tone cap has more degrees of rotation attached to it than the old-cable mimicking component.

[R.G.]

Anybody ever look at or play the Gibson L-6s?

[AL]

My friend has an L6-S.  Nice guitar - it's different than the standard Gibson group.  But, I've never taken it apart.

AL

[Nasse]

My childhood guitar hero played L5-S, is that a different animal?

[Ed G.]

I think Bill Lawrence helped design the wiring scheme and maybe also the pickups for the L-6s.

[Nasse]

Thanks for everybody about your comments, maybe I remember those when I tune my guitar tone caps some day! I had once a curly cable, but dont miss it a bit. Low-oxygen/oxygen-free copper, good shielding and some conductive plastic under the surface are great, and Neutrik plugs are good ones. But maybe some magig value caps here and there may help...

[Ed G.]

Thanks for everybody about your comments, maybe I remember those when I tune my guitar tone caps some day! I had once a curly cable, but dont miss it a bit. Low-oxygen/oxygen-free copper, good shielding and some conductive plastic under the surface are great, and Neutrik plugs are good ones. But maybe some magig value caps here and there may help...

I wouldn't go buck-wild with the shielding. I had shielded my strat with foil, shielded cable, everything, and it killed the tone of the guitar. Apparently all that shielding added some capacitance.