Which Wires Ought One to Twist Together With This Cable For DIY Pedal Patch

tlite

tlite

Aug 18, 2016
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#1
My gut instinct is telling me that regarding the question below- it doesn't matter.

BUT- curiosity is getting the better of me.

I bought some bulk cable that looks like this:
high-performance-ultra-flex-3.jpg


Braided ground, shielded, with two conductors. I only needed braided ground and one connector, but I got a deal on the cable. Yay.

I am soldering ends to mono pancake plugs like this to make patch cables (yes, I know these are not fancy plugs):
s-l1600.jpg


Anyhow. Since I have two conductors and the braided ground, I have one extra conductor.

Here are the options:
A. Am I better off twisting the two leads (blue and the white) together and soldering to the tip/hot lug of the plug, then solder braided shield to ground?

B. Or am I better just soldering one lead (white) to the pin lug, and twisting the other lead (blue) in with the braid to ground?

C. Or, ought I to just leave one wire (let's say the blue) completely out of the mix altogether and just tape it off or otherwise shield the ends?

D. Stop procrastinating and get back to my day job.
 
#2
If you use both conductors, then the capacitance of the cable will increase. Likewise, if you ground one of the conductors, then the capacitance will increase. So just leave one conductor open.

I'm confused at why you want to use balanced instrument cable for this application, though. You should be using standard single conductor wire if you don't want too much tone suck.
 
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#4
line6man said:
I'm confused at why you want to use balanced instrument cable for this application, though. You should be using standard single conductor wire if you don't want too much tone suck.
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Easy answer: I don't know any better! (and this was cheap, looked right at the store and I thought it would work).
 
#7
for patch leads, or if your bass is active, the difference in cable capacitance is really not something to be worried about. before the internet made everything so easy to get, I used 2 and 4 core canare cable for everything balanced or not, simply because that was the only high quality cable local stores stocked.

yes the capacitance is higher when a twisted pair is split from hot to earth, but in the real world you get a more reliable cable. a lot of cable faults are caused by frayed or damaged braid.
 
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#8
In the sound business, we regularly would use this sort of cable for unbalanced cables because we had a lot of it around. We would solder one wire to the braid and the other one would be the "hot" signal. Pretty much becomes a one conductor shielded cable then. Sometimes, it is advantageous to not connect that wire to the shield at one end but as an instrument cable, I wouldn't worry about it.
 
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#9
john nelson said:
Sometimes, it is advantageous to not connect that wire to the shield at one end but as an instrument cable, I wouldn't worry about it.
Click to expand...

For an instrument cable, you specifically do not want to connect the unused wire to ground. That increases capacitance.

For patch cables, however, it's not going to be a big deal, because the lengths are very short, and you are likely to be dealing with low impedance signals.
 
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#10
Thanks all- with cable at $0.20/ft (already had it prior to the post) and some old pancake plugs I had- I figured I'd try it out. I made two patch cables each about 1.5'.

One just left an unused wire, the second had the extra wire soldered in with the shield.

I have a 2 loop FX loop pedal and ran one store bought instrument patch cable through loop 1, and the homemade el cheapos one at a time through loop 2 (no effects, just the cables) so I could A/B on the fly by turning loop 2 on and off with the footswitch.

As many of you pointed out, due to the short length of the patch cables I couldn't detect any tone suck or difference in sound between any of the three cables.

That said, I was running through a 1x10 cab with a BP102 so the high end isn't super distinct.

Going to try again with headphones tonight and see but so far the el cheapo DIY cables appear to be working fine.

(I also now have some Mogami instrument cable on order for peace of mind with my next cables, but the balanced hack job patches are serving well in the meantime.)

Thanks TB for the help!

-Ted
 
#11
Mogami 2524 arrived and I soldered up two patch cables using some GLS pancakes. I have officially retired the el cheapos. The Mogami cable was super easy to work with. I guess if one is going to spend the time getting all the soldering stuff out, and spend time carefully putting it all together, one might as well use decent stuff.

Still it's fun to make use of old stuff, but I have no remorse about ditching the cheap ones I made in favor of the new Mogami/GLS cables.
 
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