How To Get Great Electric Guitar Tone.

When it comes to creating great electric guitar tone, there are many factors that account for this carefully calculated recipe. who’s to say what the best guitar sound really is?

This is completely subjective to the person being asked. However, there are common key elements that are present in most every amazing electric guitar tone, and a full spectrum of frequencies are indeed one of those key elements.

Today, we’re going to look at guitar cables and examine what this simple little lifeline is (or isn’t) doing for our Ultimate Guitar Tone…To get the ultimate guitar tone, we need to start with the Core Guitar Tone.

(Core Guitar Tone or CGT, is your guitar plugged directly into the front of the amp with absolutely nothing else in the signal chain anywhere.)

Electric Guitar Tone is created by multiple factors all working together.

One of those factors are guitar cables, and they do indeed affect the signal and the tone of your sound. One simple single guitar cable can be responsible for instant good or bad quality.

This is exactly why I recommend that you spend some time working with different guitar cables to pin point the one you like best.

You’ll only have to do this once, because after the initial time spent to narrow down your choices and finally pick, you’ll want to use that type of cable throughout your entire signal chain to maintain consistency.

So, talking from experience and knowing what helped me to quickly overcome this process of cable comparisons and eliminations, I simply spent a couple days rounding up and locating as many different types of cables as I possibly could.

This includes cheap ones and expensive ones and everything in between. I  gathered tons of different brands of cables from all over. I also rounded up all the cables I had, as well as ones my friends had.

If You Want Amazing Electric Guitar Tone, Sometimes You Have To Try Crazy Things Like This To Find Out What Actually Happens To The Quality Of Your Signal As It Passes Through Different Cables.

Gathering up all those cables may have sounded like a crazy thing to do, but it was one of the best things i ever did to educate myself on guitar cables, regarding signal loss and tone robbery.

I would never have thought to try something like this if it weren’t for several months of wondering why my guitar tone would suddenly change from time to time.

I wasn’t changing anything or any components in the rig. At times I would notice gain loss, or presence loss, and the worst of all… saggy bottom, instead of tight focused low end.

These aren’t the desired ingredients for creating the ultimate guitar sound.

One day, i was swapping out a simple patch cord and noticed a difference immediately in my entire guitar tone. It then dawned on me that the patch cord was affecting my overall guitar tone.

That’s when I started experimenting with my cords and realized the huge amount of influence my cables had on my overall guitar tone.

Keep in mind, i was using all kinds of mixed matched cables at the time. This didn’t help the scenario any.

This is why I spent the time going through tons of different cables to discover what worked best for me.

As i mentioned, you’ll only have to do this once if you spend the time gathering as many cables as possible, then do it all in one day.

I advise you to record audio auditions of each cable and document the brand so when you can play them back, you be able to further analyze each cable.

You’ll Know When You’re Playing Through The Right Cable, When It Sounds Right and Feels Right.

Yes, you’ll feel it in the guitar as well, and this is critical when creating the Ultimate Guitar Tone.

You’ll notice differences in things like

• Frequency drops or frequency harshness
• Loss of gain or enhanced gain
• Loss of clarity or enhanced clarity
• Saggy low end or tightly focused low end
• Big roundness of frequencies or narrow nasal frequencies
• Massive loss of sustain or increased sustain
• Dull responsiveness from the guitar or making the guitar feel Alive
• Non-transparent or cloudy without clarity

All of these things are what you’ll will notice when you’re able to rapidly examine at least 20 different types of cables through the same guitar and amp rig in one simple setting.