Wire Length / Latency / Delay / Whatever it is...

Lucius Paisley

Well-known member
Quick question about a project idea, would the position of a volume/tone pot lead to major latency/delay issues if the pot was placed a specific distance from the pickup or output?

The position would be not that different than the top kill switch on the Buckethead guitar, except for... well, it's a kill switch.
 
Not at all, the signal through a guitar cable is millions of meters per second.

You wont perceive this

The real risk of cable length is high frequency loss -but the moving a switch on a guitar up to the upper side isnt enough distance to hear.
 
Q. Does the master volume on your amp cause a delay or latency? It's at the whole other end of the chain.

A. Where the volume is doesn't have any affect on latency.
 
Guitar cable length could cause a loss of high end, but the spacing of electronics in a guitar will have no perceivable effect.
 
People have said that cable length can cause issues, so that's a different fish.

It takes hundreds of feet before there starts to be an issue. But when that happens, there is this solution:

https://www.radialeng.com/product/sgi

SGI-TX-RX-34-right-768x768.jpg
 
The thing about adding capacitance is, high frequency loss isn't the only consequence - it also lowers the resonant frequency of your pickups.
This often is perceived as fatter tone overall, in addition to damping some air & definition in the highs.
Capacitance definitely matters.

Still, even with cheap hookup wire an extra couple of inches isn't likely to affect tone in any way you can hear.
An extra foot or so would be a different story.

And as pointed out already, the time delay is not enough to have any effect.
In a single millisecond electricity travels about 186 miles.
 
I've just realised the full extent of how stupid my original question was. Especially since I want to put the volume pot where the toggle switch would usually be.

ProjTest.jpg

I might change the plate behind the tailpiece to something else.
 
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