Rick Holmstrom says he spends “a lot of time not listening to guitar. I like trying to imagine the guitar taking the place of saxophone, Ahmad Jamal’s piano, or Mose Allison’s piano. Like Billie Holiday, who does those weird little micro bends that the great singers do—how can you get a feeling like that on the guitar?”
For Holmstrom, the answer is a style that blurs the lines between traditional blues—the genre where he’s invested most of his nearly 40-year career—and a place on the edge of the envelope, where chromatic lines, finger-crafted imitations of slide, microtonal bends, and a devout belief in the unerring power of the groove telegraph his vision. Those elements plus his clean and spanky and typically Tele-driven tone have made him Mavis Staples’ music director since 2007 and caught the ear of Ry Cooder. His ability to conjure the spirit of Mavis’ late dad, Pops Staples, on her renditions of Staple Singers classics is uncanny, yet still retains Holmstrom’s distinctive flavor.
While his resume most certainly slants toward the old-school—he’s toured with harmonica aces William Clarke, Johnny Dyer, and Rod Piazza, and recorded with Jimmy Rogers, Billy Boy Arnold, and Booker T. Jones—he’s also added spectral playing to the R.L. Burnside space-straddling classic Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down and recorded a solo album in 2002, Hydraulic Groove, that seamlessly wedded funk, trip-hop, ambient electronics, and roots music. In a less conservative place than the blues market, it would’ve been widely heralded as the masterpiece cognoscenti know it to be.
Bubbles - Rick Holmstrom
Now, he’s got a new instrumental album called Get It! that’s a funky and emotive showcase for his style; chasing down his passion for the almighty groove but doing so along his distinctive path where bends get weird (“Weeping Tana”), melodies swing hard (“Robyn’s Romp”), the great spirits of the genre are summoned (“King Freddie”), the strains of Morocco echo (“Taghazout”), and hip-hop-sample-worthy rhythm tracks (“Kronky Tonk”) do some heavy lifting.
Holmstrom’s journey started as a kid in Fairbanks, Alaska. His father, a local DJ, exposed Holmstrom to the blues, soul, and R&B that would define his career. No doubt the Staple Singers’ hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Freedom Highway,” both part of Mavis’ live sets today, were on heavy rotation.
“Let’s get past all this existential, post-apocalyptic doom and have a funky good time.”
Cooder played a role in his arrival as Mavis’ musical right hand. “My band opened up for Mavis on the Santa Monica Pier,” he relates. “We get off the stage, and the promotor says, ‘Her band is stuck at LAX, but Mavis is here. Can you back her for a few songs?’ We didn’t really know her songs, but we played three or four.
“As I was walking off the stage, a guy with yellow glasses tapped me on the shoulder, and it was Ry Cooder. Ry was producing a record of Mavis’, and he liked the way we played with her. He kept telling Mavis, I guess during the session, ‘I really dug that band that played with you.’ Then our first gig with her, unbelievably, was The Tonight Show. [Laughs.]”
“The album is all my ’53 Tele except for two songs,” Holmstrom says. “It’s the variety of sounds you can get out of them. ‘All About My Girl’—that’s the neck pickup. It sounds like it could be a hollowbody. The middle is pure Stax or Motown, and then the bridge is whatever you want.”
Photo by Brad Elligood
Holmstrom’s individuality is even more surprising considering he cut his teeth during the 1980s blues explosion. While he was digging on Chicago, New Orleans, Stax, and Motown, everyone else was fixated on a particular player out of Austin, Texas. “I didn’t want anything to do with Stevie Ray Vaughan,” he says. “And that’s no diss at all. He’s a really great guitar player. But when he came out, I was like 12 years old. Playing was still an option for me. Then he came along, and it was almost enough to give up guitar.
“All you had to do was look around and see all these guys that were copying him. Everybody had a Strat, a hat, some boots, and a Super Reverb,” he explains. “So, I got a big hollowbody with a single P-90 and no cutaway and tried to learn saxophone and big band horn-section melodies.”
In forging his own way, Holmstrom sidestepped the blues-shred of those years. Preferring to let his parts breathe, he fills that space with … nothing. Check out his solo on “Looky Here” from Get It! The guy sometimes drops out for a full measure. He even ends the solo by basically not playing at all for the last two bars. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a guitarist who inspired this restraint.
Looky Here
When Rick Holmstrom was writing his new album, Get It!, the songs started with him developing melodies by singing them, then transposing them to guitar.
“Years ago, we were playing in Boston with Mavis,” Holmstrom recalls. “We got there a night early, and Ahmad Jamal was playing. He would break down a melody and only use two of the notes. It draws you in because you’re not hearing all the notes that could be there. Your brain is allowed to imagine the rest. That was a life-changing gig for me.”
Like his playing, Holmstrom’s songwriting is also decidedly non-guitar-centric. Instead of plugging in, turning up, and going for it, he says he listens. “When I’m making up songs or getting a groove going, I’ll hum or sing to myself,” he says. “Then I'll think, ‘Where does this melody go next?’ I’m not playing the guitar at that point. I’m humming it and singing it to myself. ‘Does that flow? Okay, now let’s go back and learn that on guitar.’”
Of course, the contemporary zeitgeist—not just a quest for melody—also played a role on the creation of Get It!Rick Holmstrom’s Gear
Holmstrom primarily picks with his fingers but will revert to a pick for some solos to achieve a sharper attack and a more gain-colored tone.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
Guitars
- 1953 Fender Telecaster with Ron Ellis neck pickup and ’50s Fender lap-steel bridge pickup
- 1955 Les Paul Special with phase switching
- 1940s Gibson ES-150
Effects
- SIB Electronics Echodrive
- ’60s Fender Reverb Tank
- Milkman The Amp (used as a preamp for the rented AC15 when touring)
Amps
- 1950s Valco-made 1x10 Bronson combo modded to tweed Tremolux specs (with 6V6 tubes)
- Fender silver-panel Vibrolux (with 6V6 tubes)
- Vox AC15 (rented backline when touring, with EL84 tubes)
Strings
- Dunlop (.011–.050)
“It was January ’21 and my previous record, See That Light, hadn’t even come out. Then the insurrection happened, and it started to drive me nuts,” he says. “I’m watching MSNBC and reading The Times and stuff, and it was really bugging me. The only thing I could figure to do was get creative and get my mind off it. I booked a session and started making drum loops of grooves that I thought might work.”
While the world’s events have led some artists to exercise their struggles via dark, introspective works, Holmstrom went the other way. Get It! is all about having a good time, feeling free, and reminding us of a simpler, joyful way of looking at the world. “I wanted this record to be something you might put on when you get your friends together or when you’re having a barbecue,” he says. “Let’s get past all this existential, post-apocalyptic doom and have a funky good time.”
“I’ve gotten to the point where I hate guitar pedals.”
While the album is crammed with great blues, songs like “Surfer Chuck” and “Taghazout” play with ’60s surf rock, sultry Middle Eastern motifs, and whatever else caught Holmstrom’s fancy. “FunkE3,“ in particular, with its percolating Meters-style groove and stylistic shifts, shows how far Holmstrom and crew can go.
That one had been hanging around a while. “We did a tour years ago with Mavis, where Joan Osborne opened, and we also backed Joan,” Holmstrom relates. “One of our background vocalists said, ‘Man, why don’t you walk her off with an instrumental, and then, boom, go right into the Mavis set?’ So ‘FunkE3’ is the song I started working on and ended it up being that [transitional] song a lot of nights.”
Even with a wide breadth of styles on Get It!, the album’ssound and production are the secret behind its gleefully old-school character. Inspired by classic ’50s and ’60s blues albums, the musicians tracked together, in the moment, without overthinking. “I was always trying to make things sound like Chess Records in the ’50s—like that Little Walter, Muddy Waters kind of thing,” Holmstrom says. “You can tell it’s three instruments really close to each other, with some bleed.” The other two musicians in the room were Steve Mugalian on drums and Gregory Boaz on bass.
Rick Holmstrom’s band on Get It! are also his touring partners: drummer Steve Mugalian and bassist Gregory Boaz.
Photo by Brad Elligood
Holmstrom’s commitment to tradition also permeates his guitar sound. From beginning to end, he smothers the album with vintage-style amp tones from a small combo with a split pedigree. “I used a very tiny guitar amp called a Bronson. It’s a weird Valco-made amp from the ’50s. I had a buddy of mine turn it into, like, a mid-’50s tweed Tremolux. It’s a great-sounding, magical little amp.”
Despite the wide range of gain used throughout the new album, the Bronson’s onboard tremolo, a tube-driven SIB Electronics Echodrive delay, and a 1960s Fender Reverb Tank are all the effects Holmstrom used. Even that may have bordered on too much for him.
“I’ve gotten to the point where I hate guitar pedals,” he says. “I absolutely hate them. Ideally, I would love to plug straight into an amp. No 9-volt power, no wall warts, no skinny little power cables that are going to break right before the gig. I would rather use my hands.”
“I was always trying to make things sound like Chess Records in the ’50s—like that Little Walter, Muddy Waters kind of thing.”
So how does he get all his sounds? Like everything else, the old-school way. “I turn the volume of my guitar down and pick a lot with my fingers. Then, if I turn the volume on the guitar all the way up and pick with a pick, it’s pretty gain-y.”
Not surprisingly, Holmstrom also prefers vintage guitars. Save for a couple of tunes, the entire album was recorded with only one of them. “The album is all my ’53 Tele except for two songs,” he says. “It’s the variety of sounds you can get out of them. ‘All About My Girl’—that’s the neck pickup. It sounds like it could be a hollowbody. The middle is pure Stax or Motown, and then the bridge is whatever you want.”
As versatile as the Fender Tele is, the songs “King Freddie” and “Pour One Out” begged for something different. And though that something else—a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Special—is also a drool-worthy vintage piece, this one was different. “It has an out-of-phase, push-pull tone knob on the bridge pickup,” Holmstrom says. “I can blend the amount of out-of-phase so that it’s not completely nasally thin. It’s what Peter Green did, I’m sure, with his Les Paul. All points lead back to the blues, really.”
Erlee Time - Rick Holmstrom
In this live performance video of “Erlee Time,” from Get It!, Rick Holmstrom demonstrates his playful bends, joyful sense of melody, and the vintage Tele tone that’s part of his signature.
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Elliott Sharp is a dapper dude. Not a dandy, mind you, but an elegant gentleman.
I am writing this piece for a guitar magazine, so, necessarily, I must serve up info that is guitar-centric. And I can do that, at least a little bit. But Elliott is also a noted composer, runs his own little record label, plays woodwinds proficiently, is a guitar builder/tinkerer, author, gracious supporter of other musicians’ efforts, family man, and killer blues player—a blues scholar, in fact. So where do we, the public, conditioned to needing categories, pigeonholes, and easy assessment signals, put Elliott Sharp—an artist with a powerful work ethic and a long, illustrious career of making mind-bending sounds and conceptual works? How about putting him in the pantheon of the maverick and the multifaceted? Surely this pantheon exists somewhere! In mind, in heart. To those for whom such things resonate and inspire, I bring you Elliott Sharp.
One can obviously go to the information superhighway to find info on Elliott, and to hear his music, so I won’t go into too many details about where he was born (Cleveland) and when (March 1, 1951; as of this writing, Elliott is 74), or what he is best known for (being a crucial figure in the downtown New York City scene from 1979 to the present). He is Berlin Prize winner and a Guggenheim Fellow (among other honors). And I have never asked him what strings and picks he uses, so maybe I have already blown it here. But I realize now, having taken on this assignment, that inherent in writing about and trying to explain Elliott Sharp is an implicit TMI factor. There is so much going on here, so much diverse information that could be imparted, that I would not be the least bit surprised if some readers eventually glaze over a bit and start thinking of their own life’s efforts and goals as rather paltry. I get that! Although you shouldn’t.
E# @NaturalHabitat
Here, now, is my portrait of Elliott, accompanied by what I imagine is a day in the life of Elliott when he’s at home in New York City.
Elliott Sharp is a dapper dude. Not a dandy, mind you, but an elegant gentleman. He, like so many in New York and in the world of music/art/guitar, favors dark-hued clothing (yeah, a preponderance of black) and is most often seen wearing a classic slouch hat of obvious quality. He relocated from Buffalo via Western Massachusetts to lower Manhattan in 1979 to a zone that was, back then, quite treacherously decrepit, in an apartment that offered only an hour or so of heat in the winter, etc., etc. It was cheap, and things were always happening, and, in fact, it was the 1950s domicile of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.The area became the nexus of an ever-expanding circle of iconoclastic, experimental artists of many stripes.
Sharp plays what passes for a fairly staid instrument in his collection: a bass and guitar doubleneck, in 1992.
Elliott is still in that building in the East Village, though it is now only his workplace and not his living space. I am trying to remember exactly when I met Elliott, but it was probably about 25 years ago, and he still had only the one small, original apartment and a shared music space in the Garment District. I, like countless others before and after me, stayed in that East Village apartment whenever I needed a place to crash and Elliott was elsewhere, and eventually he was able to secure the next door apartment and expand his space. This is where Elliott Sharp works every day that he is not touring, pretty much 9 to 6. The place is a bit funky and dusty, and it is filled with instruments, amps (some classics, like a mid-’60s Princeton Reverb and a tweed Champ), and other tools accumulated over many decades—in spite of the many times that certain ones had to be sold to keep bread on the table.
When he’s not composing, scoring films, recording other artists, or gigging with the bands he has been in or led for the last several decades (Mofungo, Carbon/Orchestra Carbon, SysOrk, Terraplane, The Bootstrappers, Aggragat), Elliott tinkers with guitars, pedals, mandolins. Elliott is, to me, the king of guitar transformation, and his tinkering is stunningly Frankensteinian as he guts, rebuilds, and alters all kinds of stringed instruments, both electric and acoustic. He recently told me that in the ’60s he built fuzz boxes out of tobacco tins to make money. How cool would it be to have one of those now?? If one does a search on Elliott Sharp, many photos will reveal what I'm talking about: the handcrafted doubleneck he was most often seen playing in the ’80s (there was maybe more than one), 8-string guitars, modified Strat-type guitars with completely different pickups.. He also has a fancy guitar or two, such as his Koll fanned-fret 8-string, upon which he has played many a solo recital. During Covid time,, things were a little slow in the cash-flow department and, as a family man with twins, a little extra income was needed. So Elliott started building really cool-looking guitars out of cheap
ones and parts from wherever and refinishing them in hip and attractive ways and called them Mutantu. He sold them to friends and friends of friends. Yours truly basically only changes strings on his guitars, appealing helplessly to experts to do any kind of work on his guitars and amps, afraid of costly errors. The maverick and multifaceted among us, like Elliott, possess no such fear.
Even a leader in experimental 6-string gets a little guitar face now and then—especially when he’s playing blues.
Photo by Scott Friedlander
So, back to that promised day in the life of Elliott Sharp (as imagined, with some degree of knowledge, by me): It’s early morning, and there is family to contend with. No bohemian lollygagging! So it’s feed the kids breakfast, do what parents must do. Then it’s off to the office (his studio), so Elliott dons a fine gray shirt (is that silk?), dark trousers, coat, and hat, and walks north from the family apartment on nearly the lowest point of eastern Manhattan to the East Village. The traffic and endless refurbishing of the Williamsburg Bridge roars familiarly overhead, the East River flows, and eventually a river of another kind, Houston Street, is crossed. Up the stairs to the fifth floor and the studio door is unlocked. Espresso is made. (There will be more of this.) The computer is turned on. And then ... who knows? Anything could be on the docket, but some sort of work will ensue for a good eight hours. Maybe a new graphic score for a German symphony is in the works (some of these have become visual artworks, too), or maybe it's time to try another mix of that Terraplane track, the one with Elliott’s friend, hero, and inspiration Hubert Sumlin—the one Elliott recorded not long before the famed Howlin’ Wolf guitarist joined his ancestors in the Great Beyond. Or maybe he’s recording a variation on his trio ERR Guitar (where he was originally joined by Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson), called ERE Guitar Today, with Sally Gates and Tashi Dorji. Could happen—and it did. You can see Elliott’s studio in the ERE Guitar CD booklet.
Or maybe it’s guitar tinkering/building time. Where’s that delightfully chunky neck from China that would be awesome on that fake Tele body that was just refitted with no-name humbuckers (“sounded good once I removed the pickup covers,” Elliott observes) and a resophonic guitar tailpiece? By 5 or 6 it’s time to go home, maybe cook dinner tonight. And then ... my little imagined epic ends with a tasteful cinematic cliché: the dissolve.
The E# Way
Elliott Sharp has techniques that, in some cases, are all his own. No stranger to open tunings, prepared guitar, and other extended techniques, he often utilizes rhythmic, two-hand tapping to create spiraling, hypnotic patterns. His composing over these many years has employed and embraced genetics, Fibonacci numbers, algorithms, and fractal geometry. Though a mathematics and physics know-nothing myself, I see and hear a relationship between these elements as he has applied them to his uncompromisingly avant-garde compositions and these tapping patterns often heard in his solo work. Once he kicks in signal processing, stand back! What one hears sounds like four people (or other species and life forms), and the sensation is exhilarating. Sure, there could also be evidence of (here it comes) skronk (I can't believe I used that word), but Elliott certainly does not reside permanently in that world. Enjoying all kinds of sounds, from the lonesome moan of a resonator guitar to the aleatoric sputterings and squeals of a tormented electric guitar, is something he and I share, after all. Take, for example, two of his latest recordings on his zOaR imprint, Mandorleand Mandocello, which document his solo work on the two instruments, respectively. Both recordings investigate the instruments’ acoustic characteristics before, about half-way through, switching suddenly to electric, ultra-processed sounds. It’s a bracing experience that explains a few things about this man and the breadth of his aesthetic sweep. The sounds bring up images of recombinant DNA (information on which he has also imbued into his work), roiling lava, and the ever-expanding universe. Recommended!
Sharp applies his wicked two-handed-tapping technique to his 8-string, fanned-fret guitar built by Saul Koll.
Photo by Scott Friedlander
So, this might fit into the aforementioned TMI category, but Elliott Sharp puts out a staggering amount of recordings. Every time I see him (which is not often enough), he has a little pile of compact discs for me, often on zOaR. I saw somewhere recently that he has released 165 recordings, but I think there are probably more than that. It’s hard for even the data lords to keep up! But it’s not always Elliott Sharp pieces or improvisation/collaborations on these albums. Other artists whom Elliott knows and respects can be represented, such as Spanish electric guitarist/conceptualizer A. L. Guillén, late bassist/producer Peter Freeman, Italian voice and guitar duo XIPE, or Hardenger fiddle player Agnese Amico—all articulate and singular musicians whom Elliott assists by releasing their music. I am grateful for this. It’s obviously more “work” for Elliott, and he accomplishes it, along with everything else he takes on or imagines doing, with elegant aplomb. Though obviously a nose-to-the-grindstone worker, Elliott is generally low-key and relaxed, even after those espressos.
The last thing I want to write about is Elliott's interpretations of the music of Thelonious Monk. Are you surprised, even after everything else you have just read, that something like that exists? In 2003, Elliott released a solo acoustic guitar recording called Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk!, and stunned the world (well, those few who pay attention to such things). However, my first exposure to Elliott's Monk interpretations was the more recent Monkulations, expertly recorded live in Vienna in 2007. (You can hear it on Bandcamp). These recordings are, justifiably I suppose, controversial in certain corners, because they do not adhere to Monk's exact written particulars note-for-note. Yet the mood, gestures, rhythmic wonders, and even the harmonic depth of Thelonious Monk often emerges, and frequently in astonishing ways. I understand why some would take issue with this approach because it departs significantly from the jazz tradition, but I find it remarkably fresh, bold, and so delightfully E#. They reveal an aspect of Elliott’s thinking and playing that is surprising in some ways, but also so him. It is clear to me that Elliott has seriously examined and internalized Monk’s repertoire.
Spring(s) in the garden: Sharp can use just about any tool in his improvisations.
Photo by Norman Westberg
Elliott is an artist who plays more than one instrument, plays them all in unique, startling, and often innovative ways, composes rigorous conceptual works from chamber music to operas, makes electronic music with no guitar, plays mean blues guitar like a swamp rat, authors books (I highly recommend his mostly memoir IrRational Music, and a second book is emerging this fall), builds and modifies guitars and other devices, is stunningly prolific, and is an elegant gentleman. The planet is a better place with him and his work in it. The maverick and multifaceted often have a rough road to tread, as we all know. So check out Elliott Sharp's vast world if any of this seems interesting to you. Thanks, Elliott!
YouTube
Watch Elliott Sharp and Marc Ribot deliver a masterclass in free improvisation at Manhattan’s Cornelia Street Café in 2010—Sharp’s two-handed tapping and slide playing included.
Elliott Sharp’s Favorite Gear
This doubleneck guitar accompanied Sharp on many of his ’80s performances and is one of his earlier experimental instruments, as is this 8-string.
Road
Guitars
• Strandberg 8-string Boden
• 1996 Henderson-Greco 8-string
Amp
• Fender Deluxe Reverb or black-panel Twin Reverb (depending on size of venue)
• Trace-Elliot bass amp w 4x10 cabinet
(live rig uses both amps, run in stereo)
Effects
• Eventide H90 w/ Sonicake expression pedal
• Sonicake Fuzz
• Hotone Komp
• Hotone Blues
• TC Electronic Flashback 2
• VSN Twin Looper
Accessories
• Slides, EBows, springs, metal rods and strips, small wooden and ceramic square plates
Road
Guitars
• Strandberg 8-string Boden
• 1996 Henderson-Greco 8-string
Amp
• Fender Deluxe Reverb or black-panel Twin Reverb (depending on size of venue)
• Trace-Elliot bass amp w 4x10 cabinet
(live rig uses both amps, run in stereo)
Effects
• Eventide H90 w/ Sonicake expression pedal
• Sonicake Fuzz
• Hotone Komp
• Hotone Blues
• TC Electronic Flashback 2
• VSN Twin Looper
Accessories
• Slides, EBows, springs, metal rods and strips, small wooden and ceramic square plates
Home
Guitars
• 1946 Martin OO-18 acoustic guitar
• 2006 Squier 51 (Sharp explains: “On New Year's Day 2007, I took the twins down to the East River in their stroller. They were 15 months old and knew a few words. As we rolled along, they started shouting “guitar, guitar,” and, sure enough, sticking out of a garbage can was a black Squier 51 that someone had attempted to ritually sacrifice. Brought it home and cleaned it, and it’s become a favorite couch guitar.”)
Obviously, any sound that emerges from the Triple-Course Bass Pantar is likelly to be interesting.
Studio
Guitars and stringed instruments
• Fender 1994 ’50s Telecaster built from a Fender-offered kit
• Mutantum lime green metalflake Strat w/Seymour Duncan Little ’59 pickups
• Mutantum solidbody “manouche” Strat w/classical neck
• Saul Koll custom 8-string
• Rick Turner Renaissance Baritone
• 1966 Epiphone Howard Roberts
• 1965 Harmony Bobkat
• 1984/’96 Heer-Henderson Doubleneck
• 1956 Gibson CF-100 acoustic guitar
• 1968 Hagstrom H8 8-string bass
• Mutantum Norma fretless electric
• Godin Multiac Steel Duet
• 2001 Dell’Arte Grande Bouche
• 1958 Fender Stringmaster 8-string console steel guitar
• 1936 Rickenbacker B6 lap steel
• 1950s Framus Nevada Mandolinetto
• Mutantum Electric Mandocello
• Arches H-Line
• Triple-Course Bass Pantar
Amps
• 1966 Fender black-panel Princeton Reverb
• 1980 Fender 75 (Per Sharp: “Cut down to a head and modded by Matt Wells into a Dumble-ish monster! For recording, it plugs into a 1x10 cab with a Jensen speaker or a Hartke Transporter 2x10 cab
• 1970 Fender Bronco
• 1960 Fender tweed Champ modded by Matt Wells
Effects and Electronics
• Vintage EHX 16-Second Delay w/foot controller
• Eventide H3000
• Eventide PitchFactor
• Lexicon PCM42
• ZVEX Fuzz Factory
• Summit DCL-200 Compressor Limiter
• SSL SiX desktop
• Prescription Electronics Experience
• Zoom Ultra Fuzz
• Korg MS-20 analog synthesizer
• Korg Volca Modular synthesizer
• Make Noise 0-Coast synthesizer
• Moog Moogerfooger Ring Modulator
• Moog Moogerfooger Low-Pass Filter
• Softscience Optical Compressor (for DI recording, custom made by Kevin Hilbiber)
Strings
• Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046) or Power Slinky (.011–.048), for conventional guitar.
Today, the choice of guitar cables is better than it’s ever been, and you can choose between countless options regarding color, stability, plug style, length, diameter, bending strength, shielding, etc. A lot of companies offer high-quality cables in any imaginable configuration, and there are also cables promising special advantages for specific instruments or music styles, from rock to blues to jazz.
Appearance, stability, longevity, bending stiffness, and plug configuration are matters of personal preference, and every guitarist has their own philosophy here, which I think is a great thing. While one player likes standard black soft cables with two straight plugs, their buddy prefers red cables that are stiff as hell with two angled plugs, and another friend swears by see-through coiled cables with golden plugs.
“We often want to come as close as possible to sounding like our personal heroes, but we fail because we’re using the wrong cable for a passive guitar.”
Regarding reliability, all these parameters are important. Who wants a guitar cable making problems every time you are on stage or in the studio? There are also technical parameters like resistance, capacitance, transfer resistance on the plugs, and more. Without making it too technical, we can summarize that, sound-wise, the only important technical parameter for a passive guitar circuit is the capacitance of the cable. Sadly, this information is often missing in the manufacturer’s description of a guitar cable, and there’s another thing we have to keep in mind: Most manufacturers try to offer cables with the smallest possible capacitance so the guitar can be heard “unaltered” and with a “pure” tone. While these are honourable intentions, they are self-defeating when it comes to making a guitar sound right.
Let’s take a trip back to the past and see what cables players used. Until the early 1980s, no one really cared about guitar cables—players simply used whatever was available. In the ’60s and ’70s, you could see a lot of ultra-long coiled cables on stage with players like Clapton, Hendrix, May, Townshend, Santana, and Knopfler, to name just a few. They used whatever was available, plugged in, and played without thinking about it. Ritchie Blackmore, for example, was famous for notoriously using incredibly long cables on stage so he could walk around. Joe Walsh and many other famous players did the same. Many of us have these players’ trademark sounds in our heads, and we often want to come as close as possible to sounding like our personal heroes, but we fail because we’re using the wrong cable for a passive guitar. So what are we talking about, technically?
It’s important not to look at the guitar cable, with its electrical parameters, as a stand-alone device. The guitar cable has to be seen as part of the passive signal chain together with the pickups, the resistance of the guitar’s pots (usually 250k or 500k), the capacitance of the wires inside the guitar, and, of course, the input impedance of the amp, which is usually 1M. The interaction of all these in a passive system results in the resonance frequency of your pickups. If you change one of the parameters, you are also changing the resonance frequency.
”Ritchie Blackmore, for example, was famous for notoriously using incredibly long cables on stage so he could walk around.“
You all know the basic formulation: The longer the cable, the warmer the tone, with “warmer” meaning less high-end frequencies. While this is true, in a few moments you will see that this is only half the truth. Modern guitar cables are sporting a capacitance of around 100 pF each meter, which is very low and allows for long cable runs without killing all the top end. Some ultra-low-capacitance cables even measure down to only 60 pF each meter or less.
Now let’s have a look at guitar cables of the past. Here, capacitances of up to 400 pF or more each meter were the standard, especially on the famous coiled cables. See the difference? No wonder it’s hard to nail an old-school sound from the past, or that sometimes guitars sound too trebly (especially Telecasters), with our modern guitar cables. This logic only applies to our standard passive guitar circuits, like those in our Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, SGs, and most other iconic guitar models. Active guitars are a completely different ballpark. With a guitar cable, you can fine-tune your tone, and tame a shrill-sounding guitar.
“No problem,” some will say. “I simply use my passive tone control to compensate, and that’s it. Come on, capacitance is capacitance!” While this logic seems solid, in reality this reaction produces a different tone. “Why is this?” you will ask. Thankfully, it’s simple to explain. You might be familiar with the typical diagrams showing a coordinate system with "Gain/dB" on the Y-axis and "Frequency/kHz" on the X-axis. Additional cable capacitance will shift the resonance frequency on the X-axis, with possible differences of more than one octave depending on the cable. A cable with a higher capacitance will shift the resonance frequency towards the left and vice versa.
Diagram courtesy Professor Manfred Zollner (https://www.gitarrenphysik.de)
Now let’s see what happens if you use your standard passive tone control. If you close the tone control, the resonance frequency will be shifted downwards mostly on the Y-axis, losing the resonance peak, which means the high frequencies are gone. This is a completely different effect compared to the additional cable capacitance.
Diagram courtesy Professor Manfred Zollner (https://www.gitarrenphysik.de)
To summarize, we can say that with different cable capacitances, you can mimic a lot of different pickups by simply shifting the resonance frequency on the X-axis. This is something our passive tone control can’t do, and that’s exactly the difference you will have to keep in mind.
So, let’s see what can be done and where you can add additional cable capacitance to your system to simulate longer guitar cables.
1. On the cable itself
2. Inside the guitar
3. Externally
In next month’s follow-up to this column, we will talk about different capacitances and how you can add them to your signal chain with some easy-to-moderate modding, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
