is capacitance capacitance?

[daz]

You all know i ask some pretty stupid questions. But the reason i do is that often you find that in the context you're talking about there is some detail you never thought of that might change the answer. So cut me some slack before you label me as dumb as this question sounds. ASSUMING you have sensitive enough of an ear to hear it, if you took a guitar cable that lets say measures 400pf between hot and ground, will another cable that reads 150pf sound exactly the same if you soldered a 250pf across it?

[nosaj]

Shouldn't you measure from hot tip to hot tip I thought the capacitance was from end to end. Something between hot to ground on a cable sounds wrong.

Jason

[daz]

Shouldn't you measure from hot tip to hot tip I thought the capacitance was from end to end. Something between hot to ground on a cable sounds wrong.

Jason

No. That's a dead short. I can't see why you would measure it that way. Capacitance is between two conductors that aren't physically shorted.

[nosaj]

Does this help any? The Cable Conundrum

jason

[Jazz P Bass]

Here is a cool calculator: Wire Capacitance Calculator

[eschertron]

You all know i ask some pretty stupid questions.

I know you have an ear that won't quit

Using ideal components, any two capacitances will add just the way you've described. it doesn't matter that one's long and skinny and that the other's short and round.

Modeling them as real devices, there are parasitic resistances and inductances that can be taken into account. Suffice it to say that a cap will have a different set of parasitics than a cable. Can you hear the difference? Maybe you can, I'm not sure that I could though

Eric Johnson is said to be able to hear tonal differences depending on how his guitar cable was laying across the floor.

[Chuck H]

eschertron has the right of it. There will be some small effects other than capacitance. How small? I dunno, but probably pretty damn small. I'd bet that you COULD effectively simulate a higher capacitance cable by simply adding a capacitor to a lower capacitance cable. I've even considered building a small rig to simulate longer cables when using shorter ones just to listen for the point of diminishing returns WRT things like sparkly highs and pinch harmonics vs. hashy treble and brittle glassiness. Just another thing I may never get around to.

[daz]

I'd bet that you COULD effectively simulate a higher capacitance cable by simply adding a capacitor to a lower capacitance cable.

Thats what i was considering. I remember a gig i did years ago where a 2 foot cable i ran from a device on top of my amp to the amp input was bad, and the only other cable i had was a good 20 feet that i used in case my wireless went down. So i swapped that in place of the 2 footer and i had the best tone that nite i had had in a long time to a very noticeable degree. And every rig i have ever had i felt that the change i heard that nite could be helpful. cutting highs in other ways does it differently in a way i don't like. so i was thinking this could be a good idea to add a cap or even have a box with various values and a rotary switch to pick one of 3-5 different values.

[Chuck H]

Or... You could just carry a bag of cables and couplers. Always useful and no weirdness to remember regarding what cables have caps added and such. True tale: Glen Kuykendall, probably Trainwrecks best promoter, uses two twenty foot cables coupled together between his guitar and TW Express for the added capacitance.

[daz]

Or... You could just carry a bag of cables and couplers. Always useful and no weirdness to remember regarding what cables have caps added and such. True tale: Glen Kuykendall, probably Trainwrecks best promoter, uses two twenty foot cables coupled together between his guitar and TW Express for the added capacitance.

Caps are more convenient.

[Diablo]

Any reason you can't adjust your tone with.........the tone controls on the guitar and amp?

[eschertron]

Any reason you can't adjust your tone with.........the tone controls on the guitar and amp?

You can never have too many bands of EQ

[Chuck H]

Any reason you can't adjust your tone with.........the tone controls on the guitar and amp?

Like daz pointed out, it sounds different depending on where you cut. It just does. Some of the Stan types may not agree that it matters much, but it does. So, yes, you can cut highs with the tone control. But the point in the amplification chain will be different and the actual knee will be different. If any distortions are happening between the points considered, that would be different too. As well as any harmonics and overtones affected by the different placement of the affect. Tuning a guitar amp can be a sonic soup (or a hot mess depending on how you look at it ). It ALL matters. Even if techs that "know better" don't think it should.

[Leo_Gnardo]

You can never have too many bands of EQ

Like this? That's not stereo, it's a mono 1/6 octave graphic B&K model 123.

Heck, on PA I patch a 1/3 octave graphic into the snare channel. Snare sounds bad? Gimme a minute, woah, now THAT sounds GOOD! Fun to send electric guitar thru one just for fun, or anything for that matter. You can turn chalk to cheese to chocolate.

I got tired of asking drummers to tune their boinky doinky sounding snares. I can fix it this way a lot faster, with no foot-dragging or bad attitude from the percussionist.

[teemuk]

Any reason you can't adjust your tone with.........the tone controls on the guitar and amp?

A guitar pickup forms a resonant circuit: the coil inductance resonates with capacitance of the circuit, and to some extent this is damped by resistance of the circuit. That is, all capacitance and all resistance within the resonant circuit, which also includes those of the guitar coord, the input stage the guitar plugs to, the pickup coil itself, and the volume/tone controls within the guitar.

Different settings of the tone control will alter resonant frequency, but the resistance of the pot also alters damping of the resonant peak and therefore at extreme settings result to a "muffled", dead tone. This is entirely different function than altering only the capacitance of the resonant circuit, which shifts resonant frequency up or down but does not alter damping characteristics.

Like daz pointed out, it sounds different depending on where you cut. It just does.

It's not so much about "where" but about how.