Guitar wire capacity.

[freefrog]

So then for all practical purposes (meaning if you're playing in a band with other instruments and vocals, and/or playing live to a somewhat noisy audience, or even a fairly quiet one), all this really doesn't matter since not one person would be able to hear a difference.

I'll concede that it makes a difference to electronic audio testing equipment, and maybe even in quality recording, but even then when the tracks are mixed together I doubt that that small amount of difference in the actual sound would be noticed.

I do say that I really appreciate the knowledge and expertise of Freefrog and all the time he puts in to obtaining actual factual information rather than just opinion or theory. It is indeed commendable. This info helps keep us focused on what is real.

Doc, sharing data is a pleasure for me. I'm afraid to have been boring by talking so much in this topic but being stuck at home with health issues, I’ve posted a lot because it helped me to focus on something else.

Now…

The topic above appears to me as being less about capacitance than resistance: The resistance that I had the feeling to face above, while I was just trying to share data in order to help. LOL. JK, of course...

More seriously: our community tends to focus on the idea that tiny capacitive differences make tiny tonal differences.

And it’s true. And I’ve never denied that.

But anyone doing the effort to read entirely my tedious posts will have understood that I was talking about something else: I.E. about how parasitic capacitance of pickups wiring can vary, fluctuate for overlooked reasons and have unexpected side effects.

IME, it can be heard, even on stage with a bar band… I clearly remember a guy in an audience complaining loudly about a Strat tone as being too harsh (in bridge pickup position)… while it was due to an offensive peak that a minor capacitive adjustment would have (and has then) tamed. I also recall my unpleasing experience on stage with a prototype of pickup promoting obsessively a nasty 11khz peak. Through a Fender amp @ 6/10, it sounded like tinnitus. Lab gear helped me to track and to solve this issue, by acting on stray capacitance.

Magnetic guitar pickups remain largely resistive / inductive / capacitive filters. Wires coming from them are not neutral links, therefore: each lil’ bit of cable is potentially a mini capacitive EQ for a passive PU. It stays true in my mind weither a guitar is played on stage, recorded or tested. Hence my contributions above, posted with positive intentions - I know you know this.

Enough said or I'll be banned for talking too much. <:0)

 

[GuitarDoc]

:biglaugh::laugh2:
You'll never be banned for talking too much or contributing too much. Your contributions are much appreciated by the majority of forum members. I admit that they sometimes go way over my head and they give more info than I personally need but they let me know that you know what you're talking about...because you've done the research and testing to back it up.

 

[Chistopher]

Let's REprecise my posts, so.

1-PICKUPS.
I generally keep them with a decent lenght of their own cable. More than 15cm.

2-GUITARS.
*The Flying V is a 69 model, with pots, switch and jack plug immediately next to each others. The only coax. cables involved are those of the pickups.
*In the Explorer, each pickup goes to its own volume next to the output, then from each volume to the switch on the upper bout through a coax. cable. A third coax. cable goes from the switch to the tone control to the output jack.
The switch being mounted on the pickguard/scratchplate, the three coax. cables coming from the electronic cavity must be longer and are not only tied altogether but also folded on each others, forming a squashed "Z" in the routing going to the switch.

IOW, there's a lot more capacitive cable in the Explorer.

So, no, there's nothing "off" in my tests. I've not been surprised at all by the results, that I expected since I systematically measure resonant peaks when I've mounted pickups in a guitar. Instruments hosting good lenghts of cable always exhibit lower pitched resonances, because of stray capacitance.

Now I've certainly shared the comparison above because it was spectacular: the wiring in the mentioned Explorer exhibits some serious parasitic capacitance.

If it still seems odd, my post 5 in this topic hosts a potential explanation coming from M.Zollner & the GITEC.
Proximity and pressure also tend to increase capacitance, BTW. Press a cable on itself and it should be more capacitive than when it's straight. Sit down on it and the reading will get worse... ;-)
...oh, and... guitar cable is less capacitive because of its usually bigger diameter allowing a thicker insulation between core wires and outer shield. Guitar cables are meant to measure 70pF to 130pF per meter (according to Zollner and albeit my own averaged data on +/- 50 cables say 147pF per meter). I've already said somewhere above that I had measured 268pF per meter on Gibson style braided shielded wire in DRY air, and that it mounted to 1165pF per meter because of moisture in the online test published by Zollner...

NOTE - In the vid from the GITEC, the gap between resonances in a SG and a LP is actually slightly greater than in my own tests: closer to 1500hz than to the 1khz of difference that I've measured and that the spectrum of the played guitars translates faithfully, as expected (by me at least, after many comparable tests).

Hope it's clearer now.

This is a pretty good block of text to put in a "notes" file.