This photo of Yola with her replica of Sister Rosetta’s 1961 SG Custom was taken just hours before she hit the red carpet for the 64th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony on April 3, 2022. Yola was nominated for Best Americana Album (Stand for Myself) and Best American Roots Song (“Diamond Studded Shoes”).
“I have this love affair with the ’70s—this gray area of music where one genre talks to another,” proclaims six-time Grammy nominee Yola. “That gave rise to loads of bands we would find hard to place nowadays, like Parliament-Funkadelic, Minnie Riperton, and Rotary Connection. They show how everything has been influenced by something else in the music sphere. It gets us away from this idea of genres, you know? And so that’s something that I consciously want to do. It’s like a mission.”
If Yola’s goal on her most recent release, Stand for Myself, was to meld her musical influences and life experiences into a cohesive, singular approach that craftily defies categorization, then mission accomplished. Songs like “Starlight,” “Diamond Studded Shoes,” and the title track, draw equally on the aforementioned seminal artists that Yola discovered via her mother’s ’70s record collection, as well as the mixtapes she created from listening to the British radio of her youth, which featured everything from ’90s neo-soul to R&B to Britpop. In any given song on Stand for Myself, you can likely identify familiar sonic themes, but when channeled through the lens of Yola’s personal experience, the result is an album that assimilates decades of music with a refreshingly contemporary point of view.
“I needed to take this concept of inaccessibility and patriarchy and whitewashing that were bestowed upon the legacy of rock ’n’ roll post-Sister Rosetta and undo that process.”
Yola was born Yolanda Claire Quartey in 1983 in Bristol, England. She first cut her teeth in the U.K. as a lead vocalist and songwriter with bands like Phantom Limb, Massive Attack, and Bugz in the Attic. She subsequently worked as a top-line writer, creating lyrics and melodies for artists like Will Young, Chase & Status, and Katy Perry. Her powerhouse vocals have even been sampled by the Chemical Brothers and Iggy Azalea. Her 2019 debut, Walk Through Fire, received widespread acclaim from Rolling Stone and The New York Times, which praised her “genre-fluid” blending of sounds, from “vintage Southern soul” to the “early-1960s pop melodramas of the Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison.” That album earned Yola four Grammy award nominations, including Best New Artist. With Stand for Myself, she earned two more Grammy nominations, for Best Americana Album and for Best American Roots Song for “Diamond Studded Shoes.”
Sonically, Yola arrived at the musical medley that is Stand for Myself through what she calls a “process of metabolizing your influences.” She describes it as bringing oneself to the artistic table. “No one’s going to be able to replicate your perception of reality,” explains Yola. “Honestly, the only new thing that really exists in that matrix of your experience is you. And what’s really important to do in music as an artist is to find how you interject yourself into the process of being artistic, so by the time you bring your influences back out into the world, they aren’t what they were when they went in. They’ve been changed by being seen, and heard, and appreciated by you.”
Yola - "Stand For Myself" [Official Music Video]
To that point, Yola’s songs on Stand for Myself lyrically explore deeply personal themes that are often informed by her own research on the paradigm of supremacy, and instances of bigotry and racism that have deeply impacted her life and career. She now finds herself poised to help fulfill part of an incomplete narrative that includes what she calls “the whitewashing of the influence of Black women in the birth of rock and roll” via her portrayal of Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis biopic. “You don’t get a whole rounded story of Elvis without telling the actual truth,” she asserts. “And the truth is way more interesting and complicated than the narrative that is thrown at us by white male rockdom.”
The soundtrack for Elvis was recorded at RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Slash) in Nashville. “Principally, they recognized that I had experience doing voiceover for music sample replay for about 15 years, which was exactly the skill set that was required,” Yola explains. Combined with burgeoning guitar chops, she was essentially a shoo-in for the role of Tharpe, except that she’d never soloed before. “I had to do my first solos ever on camera, which is just ridiculous to think,” she laughs. The audio production team on Elvis sent her slowed down versions of the songs so she could learn Sister Rosetta’s solos by ear. “Everything I do is by ear,” Yola says. She would sing the melody of the solo, and then the production team would let her know “where they thought it was on the neck” that Sister Rosetta was playing. For the film, Gibson sent her a replica of Sister Rosetta’s 1961 SG Custom.
Yola’s Stand for Myself was released in 2021 and recorded at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. The album was nominated for Best Americana Album at the 2022 Grammy Awards.
Yola says the bigger challenge, however, was singing counter to the rhythm of what her fingers were doing with the guitar. “She [Sister Rosetta] was always kind of dovetailing a solo while she was singing, and then she’d stop singing and do another solo,” explains Yola. “But she’d already been noodling right across her vocals. So, I had to get good at rubbing my tummy and patting my head.” It took time, and it took “some tuition,” she says, with help from composer Elliott Wheeler, production designer Catherine Martin, and movement coach Polly Bennett—all of whom “pretty much ferried me from this rhythm player who sings and writes songs to this kind of shredder.”
“The idea is to disable my prefrontal cortex—that excessive analytical thinking that one might believe is what we write with.”
Apparently, the production team did have the option for a hand double, but Yola says it was important that she play the actual guitar solos herself. “I needed to take this concept of inaccessibility and patriarchy and whitewashing that were bestowed upon the legacy of rock ’n’ roll post-Sister Rosetta and undo that process,” she declares. “The programming is absolute—it’s very effective and it doesn’t help tell the truth at all.” Yola calls the absence of Sister Rosetta in most rock ’n’ roll history books “problematic,” and that it became important for her to present to the world the context in which they understand the legacy of rock ’n’ roll. “She was the first person to distort the guitar and to bend the strings in the way that we now recognize as the blueprint for rock and roll music,” Yola contends. “Without distorting the amp, without the shred, without the tempo and the swing with which she delivered her solos, rock ’n’ roll doesn’t exist.” She hopes her portrayal of Sister Rosetta helps to set the record straight, but perhaps more importantly she’d like her performance to help dismantle the idea of being disenfranchised from the guitar, which is something she says plagued her. “I was told all the time when I was in England that I shouldn’t be anywhere near a guitar.”
Yola’s Gear
On her current headlining tour, Yola plays a Telecaster at Birmingham, Alabama’s Saturn venue on March 20, 2022. Her other go-to electric is a fiesta red Fender Noventa Jazzmaster.
Photo by Josh Weichman
Guitars
- Fender Paramount Series PM-1 Limited Adirondack Dreadnought
- Fender Noventa Jazzmaster
- Fender Custom Shop American Classic Telecaster
- Gibson 1961 SG Custom Reissue (for Sister Rosetta role in Elvis)
- Martin (000-size body)
As for picking up the guitar for her own music, Yola describes her initial impulse, originally by way of a Martin 000-series, as a “low-lift” way of being able to bring fully formed songwriting ideas to the table. “When I was a top-line writer, I’d have an idea, and it would be relatively full and complete in my head, but then I’d try to explain that to somebody and it would become changed unrecognizably, because you don’t know how to do anything other than suggest something. And so [playing guitar] is just the freedom to be able to finish a thought process.” She says it also makes collaboration more straightforward. “You’re able to say, ‘Here’s a bit of an idea. I have a verse and a chorus, but I don’t have a bridge, can you do me one? Here’s the context.’ You’re able to bring something full to the table.” She cites “Stand for Myself” as an example. “I knew that I wanted it to have a bit more of a sus4 feeling,” she recalls. “But I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted it to be repetitive or if I wanted there to be a movement of Dsus4, so I called my friend, Hannah V, and we figured it out.”
Yola generates her own light, posing onstage with her Fender PM-1 electro-acoustic at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
Photo by Joseph Ross Smith
Yola says playing guitar became even more essential during the pandemic, when intimate settings, requiring fewer musicians, like her NPR Tiny Desk appearances, started becoming the norm. “If it can hold together relatively stripped down, then it’s probably a good song,” she asserts. “Production is important, but the melodic hooks that are important to the song have to be able to be told on a couple of instruments.” Yola often wields a Fender Paramount Series acoustic guitar during such performances.
“I was told all the time when I was in England that I shouldn’t be anywhere near a guitar.”
As for the actual act of songwriting itself, Yola gravitates towards “motor-skill-forward” activities, like vacuuming, showering, and walking to get into a “hypnotic state.” She also stays up late, watching TV and strumming the guitar idly, going through chord changes. “The idea is to disable my prefrontal cortex—that excessive analytical thinking that one might believe is what we write with.” The “most elegant connections,” she professes, are made without using that part of the brain. “So, I’d try to distract it—the guitar being the thing that jogs the inspiration into the rest of my brain, once I’ve got the prefrontal cortex taken care of.”
Yola says playing guitar is “the freedom to be able to finish a thought process.”
Photo by Katie LaRocca
Circling back around to the Elvis biopic, she again emphasizes the importance of putting Sister Rosetta’s legacy into the context of what we know about the development of rock ’n’ roll. “It’s so people can better understand where the thing they love comes from,” she explains. “Take her discovery of Little Richard. It makes sense that a guy in drag, singing rock ’n’ roll, would be discovered by a queer Black woman, as opposed to a buttoned-up white guy from the ’50s. All of a sudden you go, ‘Well, of course. Now that makes sense [laughter]. How the hell does he survive, otherwise?’ And so, once things start making sense, it then becomes my duty, to the history of rock ’n’ roll, to the history of guitar playing, to the history of women in music, to do the homework, learn the guitar, understand Sister Rosetta’s importance, and hold the guitar aloft as this thing that gives, so much more than it takes, for every human that touches it.”
Yola - Stand For Myself (Live From Easy Eye Sound)
Yola sings her empowering anthem “Stand for Myself” with assistance from her Fender Paramount PM-1 Limited in an intimate performance at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville.
Shout, Sister, Shout! Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Here’s Gibson’s short documentary on the life of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, with a power assist from Celisse Henderson and Amythyst Kiah.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe guitar solos (in motion picture)
Check out this collection of outstanding Rosetta Tharpe guitar solos on film.
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
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!
