Underground Journal

How To Find Cheap Guitar Cables That Don’t Sound Cheap

Your guitar tone is your musical voice and every piece of gear that you have affect it.  Everything from your picks and pickups to your cables and speakers determine how your guitar tone is processed and ultimately sounds.  Gear should be carefully chosen so that every upgrade that you make is actually an upgrade!  In this post I want to show you how to get the best guitar cables for as cheap as possible.

Guitar cables are an extremely important part of your rig.  They carry the signal that your strings produce from your pickups to the amp, so crappy guitar cables are going to severely hamper your tone.  What makes one cable suck and another one not?  It’s in the construction materials.  You need the inside core material to be something that transmits your signal clean (like copper) and an outer material that will prevent interference.  Signal loss from poor materials is common, but interference will screw up your tone more than anything else.  Poor wiring in the area that you’re playing and power lines can cause severe interference.  A cable that feels solid in your hand and not cheap or flimsy is a good sign that it has good insulation.

To get the cable that you want you should try some out at your local guitar shop on a setup that is similar to yours and buy them online.  Brick and mortar retailers put a high markup on guitar accessories, but online stores tend to sell them much cheaper.  You can get them on eBay, Amazon, direct from the manufacturer, or from guitarcablesonline.com.

Upgrading your guitar tone shouldn’t cost a fortune unless you wan it to.  There are tons of different choices, and not all of them are created equal.  It’s important that you try out anything before you buy it, or buy it from somewhere that has a lenient return policy.  What works great for me could produce disastrous results on your rig, so always try before you buy!

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