carlos santana
PRS offered the Sweet Switch feature from the mid ’80s until 1991, so it is long out of production and no longer available. The story goes that Carlos Santana used very long guitar cables on stage, and when he switched over to a wireless system, his overall tone changed drastically. That is the nature of the beast, because the capacitance of the guitar cable is always part of the overall tone of an electric guitar. You all know the formula: the shorter the cable, the more high-end you will have. Translated into technical terms, this means the shorter the cable, the less capacitance it will add, resulting in more high-end. It was only natural that Santana talked to his friend Paul Reed Smith about this problem, and PRS came up with the Sweet Switch as a solution.
The Sweet Switch is a mini-toggle switch with a fixed SIP delay line (high-frequency type 1513-135Y), which has a delay time of 135 nanoseconds and an impedance of 75 ohms. This SIP delay line is long out of production. But it was still in use in the ’80s, inside conventional (non-flat) televisions using line transformers. Since it’s no longer available, when you have a faulty Sweet Switch, or if you want to build a new one into your guitar, you will have to find a substitution.
From a technical point of view, a SIP delay line will work in a passive system, but only with the correct impedance—75 ohms for the one used in a Sweet Switch. Inside a guitar, that impedance does not arise though. Instead, when you use such a HF delay line in a LF device, like an electric guitar, it acts like a capacitor, not as a delay line.
So, when you want to repair a faulty Sweet Switch or add one to your guitar, you can simply use a small capacitor on the switch to add some capacitance to the circuit, resulting in the exact same effect as the mysterious SIP delay line.
That’s our starting point. I will show you how to add this Sweet Switch substitution into any electric guitar, and, as a bonus, how to use this technology to sonically enlarge short guitar cables.
Each meter of guitar cable will add a certain amount of capacitance to the circuit, dampening some high frequencies, so the tone gets warmer or sweeter. Modern guitar cables have an average capacitance of approximately 100 pF per meter, which is very low and allows long cable runs without audible degenerations. Some high-end guitar cables only have a capacitance of 60 pF per meter or lower, but there are also old guitar cables, especially the coiled ones, that easily can add up to 400 pF per meter. Players like Hendrix, Clapton, Gilmour, May, Blackmore, and many others are well-known for using very long coiled cables in their early days on stage. So, this is part of their trademark sound, and often a piece of the puzzle that is missing when trying to come close with a modern setup.
The added capacitance will lower the resonant frequency of the pickups, so they will sound warmer, especially when using overdrive or distortion.
As a little guideline to calculate the best additional capacitance, you can use this chart:
10 ft. cable (approx. 3 meters): 1 nF
15 ft. cable (approx. 4.5 meters): 1.5 nF
20 ft. cable (approx. 6 meters): 2.2 nF
30 ft. cable (approx. 9 meters): 3.3 nF
Ultra-long cable: 4.7 nF
You should have no problem getting capacitors with these values in any local electronics store.
The added capacitance will lower the resonant frequency of the pickups, so they will sound warmer, especially when using overdrive or distortion. By the way, this is exactly the reason why a lot of distortion and fuzz boxes with a vintage voicing use an additional cap at the input section. The resulting overdrive tone is fat and warm.This mod works best with typical Strat or Tele vintage pickups (approximately 2.4 H inductance) or a typical vintage PAF (approximately 3.8 H inductance). Modern high-output pickups often have an inductance of 6 up to 8 H and don’t sound very good with this mod. If you want to make your Strat or Tele sound more Les Paul-ish, you should try 4.7 nF for the additional cap. Your Strat will sound kinda muffled when playing clean, but ultra-fat and punchy when using overdrive. Values higher than 4.7 nF are not recommended, because single-coil pickups will start to lose definition with that much capacitance.
Illustration courtesy SINGLECOIL (www.singlecoil.com)
Performing this mod is very easy. All you need is one of the caps I mentioned above and an SPST on/off mini-toggle switch. You can also use any push/pull or push/push pot to switch the mod on and off. If you want to be more flexible, you can use an on/off/on toggle switch and two caps to choose from. If you want to go wild, you can also use a rotary switch with several caps. Feel free to be creative.
As mentioned earlier, it’s all about where to place the additional cap. It’s best to insert it between hot and ground in the circuit.
If you don’t want to add an additional switch on your guitar, there is another way to perform this mod, as long as you are using conventional guitar cables, not going wireless. You can build yourself a kind of “fake cable” by simply soldering an additional cap between the hot and ground directly on the plug of the cable. For example, if you have a standard modern three-meter guitar cable but want to simulate the typical 15-meter Blackmore cable from his early Deep Purple days, try a 3900 pF cap in the plug of your cable. If you have a six-meter cable, try 3300 pF for the same effect. The plug with the additional cap should be marked and will go into the guitar, not into the amp or the first stompbox. This is a very cool way to add the desired tone to your setup without drilling any additional holes into your guitar.
That’s it! Next month we will have a closer look into Eric Johnson’s 1954 “Virginia” Stratocaster wiring and how to adopt it, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
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This episode starts off with Zach and Rhett catching each other up on their 4th of July festivities. Rhett’s was classic: he treated some visiting European friends to fireworks off a dock, barbecue, smoked wings, more fireworks, and a bunch of beer. Zach, meanwhile, was knocking on doors to tell neighbors to knock off the mortar shelling in the middle of the night. To each their own.
Then they’re joined by Nathaniel Murphy, the Chicago-based guitarist who has racked up nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram with jaw-dropping videos of solo guitar work. Rhett doesn’t mince words—he says Murphy is “one of the best players out there.” Murphy’s videos break people’s brains, they say: no one can work out how he’s playing all the parts by himself at the same time. Plus, Murphy works full-time now with Chicago Music Exchange, where he brushed shoulders with Noel Gallagher and Carlos Santana within a few days of one another this summer.
Murphy shares how he came to the U.S. to coach soccer for nearly a decade before being hired to do video demos for CME. He was busking downtown Chicago, too, and within a few years, CME brought him on full-time to cut videos. When it came time to join Instagram, he registered with his infamous handle, ZeppelinBarnatra. Murphy breaks down how the moniker came to be when he entered a contest to win tickets to Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion concert. Murphy names his favorite all-time guitar—Noel Gallagher’s Gibson J-150, which Gallagher recently signed for him—before the crew reflects on how to behave when meeting your guitar heroes.
That leads to a discussion of U2’s The Edge, whom Rhett and Murphy defend from detractors. They also agree that Teles are the most versatile guitars out there, but Zach, ever the contrarian, dissents: “To me, there’s a reason why all the dudes that played Teles back in the day switched to Les Pauls,” he shrugs. Murphy talks about his current favorite players, like Justin Derrico, Stephen Taranto, and Michael Romeo, then the trio dissect different picking techniques and go long on Blue Chip pick manufacturing processes.
Rhett, who groans that he has the touch of a blacksmith when it comes to guitar playing, praises Murphy’s sensitive playing. But even Murphy, with his prodigious playing, says he gets overwhelmed watching other players’ styles. In guitar playing, as in life, the grass is always greener.
After a performance at the 2009 Grammy awards with Carrie Underwood, she was scouted by Michael Jackson’s musical director, Michael Bearden, who contacted her on Myspace to audition for Jackson’s This Is It tour (which sadly never materialized due to Jackson’s untimely death). Orianthi got the call while she was in the studio with legendary songwriter Diane Warren, finishing up one last song for her album, Believe. By the next day, she arrived at the audition ready to play Jackson’s hits, like “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Dirty Diana,” and “Beat It.” The latter song featured the late Eddie Van Halen’s virtuosic solo, which she had to play onstage with the King of Pop at the audition. Talk about high pressure! That solo is hard enough to scuffle through in the comfort of your bedroom … imagine doing it while standing next to the greatest entertainer of all time, in a room full of scrutinizing eyes atop folded arms? And she got the gig!
“From a young age, I’ve been thrown into what people would say is like going from zero to 100 situations,” says Orianthi, who opened up for Steve Vai at only 15 (and later wrote and recorded “Highly Strung” with him). “And you go, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do this,’ and you just think positively and just have that enthusiasm. There’s no time or space for fear or doubt. I think that’s the best place to be.”
Orianthi - "Light It Up" - Official Music Video
While most artists are crippled by a double dose of writer’s block and the constant second-guessing of ideas, Orianthi’s latest release, Rock Candy, was written and recorded at warp speed (some songs were written in about 10 minutes). Producer Jacob Bunton joined Orianthi in the studio. “We got together and decided to make Rock Candy in 14 or 15 days. It was this project that we put upon ourselves to do it that way and we worked well under pressure,” Orianthi says. “It was pretty much a song a day, recorded each day, and then after I left, he would stay up late adding things and taking away things. We were both like workabees for that amount of time. We wrote the song, I laid down my vocals, put down my guitar and all that kind of stuff, on that day. He would build the basic tracks. After we did all of that, we got the band to play on it, like live drums and whatnot.”
“You go, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do this,’ and you just think positively and just have that enthusiasm. There’s no time or space for fear or doubt.”
This isn’t to say that Orianthi always just breezes through everything. In the past, she’s gotten caught up in that vicious cycle of obsessively laboring over material that, by all accounts, was already fine. “Sometimes when you force things, it doesn’t happen. Sometimes when you overthink, it destroys things,” she reveals, “because of your surroundings, too, you’re surrounded by people that are second guessing or adding to your paranoia. Sometimes it’s great when it’s constructive criticism and they make it better. Other times people don’t have the same idea, or the same energy feel, and that interferes. Sometimes it’s better to keep less cooks in the kitchen. Otherwise, it can turn into a five- or six-year project, or a two-year project, or a never-ending project. Or it will never get done, never get released. I’ve only had that happen a few times, but at the end of the day, the best records that I’ve made and had fun with were the ones I did really fast. When you make music for the moment and for yourself, you can experiment a lot.”
Orianthi fingerpicks her signature PRS Private Stock Custom 24 at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, California, on January 26, 2023.
Photo by Brad Elligood
Recorded at the iconic Sunset Sound studio in Hollywood, Rock Candy is Orianthi’s most stylistically diverse effort to date. While there are many moments of heavy guitar, particularly on tracks like “Light It Up,” with its infectious boogie riff, and “Getting to Me,” “Fire Together,” and the album closer, “Illuminate, Pt. II,” where Orianthi’s guitar solos sizzle, the album offers more than just fretboard pyrotechnics. “That’s why it’s called Rock Candy,” says Orianthi. “Everyone thought I covered the Sammy Hagar song, which I love, mind you—it’s a great song. But it really sums up the whole record. There’s a little bit of rock, a little bit of pop, it’s kind of sugar-coated, then there’s like really heavy and weird and edgy. It’s a vibe that we went for. We wanted something that was in the moment and not overthought. Keeping that childlike outlook really helped sometimes.”
Orianthi was raised in a household where music was a religion. Her dad, a gigging guitarist, reveled in a mix of rock and blues with Hendrix, Clapton, and Santana in heavy rotation, while her mom put on the Top 40 every Sunday morning. Orianthi is often classified as a rock guitarist, but she’s also worked with a lot of pop artists from Jason Derulo to Anastacia, and that pop influence seeped heavily into this new album. Songs like “Where Did Your Heart Go” have a distinct commercial feel with Orianthi’s vocals belting out honest, heart-on-sleeve lyrical content inspired from diary entries, which were written during some trying times in her personal life. “I’m a fan of a great pop song. I started as a songwriter listening [to everyone from] Elvis Presley to Roy Orbison to the Beatles. The Beatles are incredible songwriters, but they wrote pop songs, too, you know? That’s where my love of just writing came from. I was like 6 years old, listening to that and my mom’s pop collection,” she says.
Orianthi’s Gear
For Orianthi’s signature Gibson SJ-200 acoustic, she requested the neck profile from an ES-345 and designed the custom pickup with LR Baggs.
Photo by Richie Sambora
Guitars
- PRS Private Stock Custom 24 Blooming Lotus Glow Signature Model
- Gibson SJ-200 Signature Model
- 1963 Fender Stratocaster
Amps
- Orange Signature Combo
Effects
- Boss Delay
- Nexi Octaver Signature Model
Strings and Picks
- Ernie Ball .010–.056
- Dunlop 1.0 mm
Which begs the question: If the powers that be elected to transform and market Orianthi as a pop star, say, in the Billie Eilish mold, would she forsake the guitar? “No, no [laughs]. I can’t leave my guitar alone. Guitar is always going to be part of the deal. That’s for sure. For myself right now, where I’m moving into, it’s a different sort of journey and who knows what could happen in the future. My heart’s open, my mind’s open all the time, you know? Having that single, ‘According to You,’ that was a multi-platinum pop hit for me in 2010 that reached around the world. That was awesome to have that success with a pop song. And then I go, ‘Okay, that was cool and I’ve done that, but moving forward….’”
Always looking for new inspiration, Orianthi has recently been exploring the sounds of jazz artists. “I’ve been listening to Coltrane and stuff like that that’s out of the box, because if you try to play those melodies on guitar, it’s weird and it’s cool,” she says. “You listen to any Hendrix live performance. It’s not perfect, it’s never completely perfect, but it is perfect because it takes you on this colorful journey. I find it to be like light energy, where you’re not completely grounded and thinking of stuff you’ve done before. It’s just like moving forward. For me, as a guitar player, I want every performance to be better in the sense of the choice of notes and the melodies I’m coming up with. More out-of-the-box stuff, that’s important to me.”
“My dad took me to a Santana show and I was like, ‘That’s it! I’m giving up classical, I’m done with it.’ He played ‘Europa’ and those opening notes just hit me like lightning.”
Tracks like “Living is Like Dying Without You” feature a recent addition to Orianthi’s gear arsenal—her new signature Gibson SJ-200 acoustic. She was drawn to the J-200 because of its connection to Elvis and Johnny Cash. “I love the sound of a J-200 because it’s like a grand piano, it fills the room. I had a choice of other guitars when I went to Montana to create my model. Like, ‘Why would you choose a J-200? It’s massive.’ But why wouldn’t I? It sounds so good,” says Orianthi, who loved the guitar but had some reservations about its boat-sized neck. Later, at the Gibson showroom in Hollywood, she picked up a guitar that turned out to be the ES-345 that Bradley Cooper used in A Star is Born. After trying out this easy-to-play instrument, she requested an unexpected modification from Gibson for her signature axe.
“I was like, ‘Could we put an electric guitar neck on it?’,” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Yeah, we can do that. This is probably the first hybrid acoustic-electric we’ve done at Gibson.’ I’m like, ‘Why not, let’s do something different.’” Gibson mated the neck from an ES-345 to the SJ-200, and the result is a rich-sounding acoustic with the playability of an electric.
A lot of back-and-forth also took place in designing the custom pickup for her signature SJ-200. “I wanted to have a guitar where if you had a DI, the soundman could be passed out, high, or drunk and you would still sound good,” says Orianthi. “I modified that with LR Baggs, so there’s more midrange and compression. We actually adjusted the sound of the pickup by going back and forth with an LR Baggs acoustic pedal, over FaceTime and Zoom saying, ‘Modify this or modify that.’ That’s how the whole pickup system was created.”
For electric guitars, Orianthi’s signature PRS is her main instrument. The meticulously crafted instrument carries a steep price tag, retailing around $11,700. But a more accessible version may be on the horizon soon. “We’re in talks right now. Probably an SE model coming of that one,” reveals Orianthi. “Because a lot of people wanted to buy it and they couldn’t afford it. It’s very expensive, but it’s very well made. That is a dream guitar that was brought to life by the PRS team. Paul has really dialed it in. He picks the right woods, and everything is quality. They’re like Porsches [laughs], you know what I mean?”
When it comes to electric guitars, Orianthi sticks to her “dream guitar,” her PRS Private Stock Custom 24 Blooming Lotus Glow signature model. “They’re like Porsches [laughs],” she says.
Photo by Richie Sambora
For both her acoustic and electric playing, an interesting aspect of Orianthi’s style is that she often eschews picks, opting instead to use her right-hand fingers to articulate single-note lines. This technique has its origins in Orianthi’s formative years.
“I started classical at TAFE University when I was 10 and that was really boring, but my dad was like, ‘You should probably do this, and learn theory.’ I learned theory and got past two or three, I think, and passed really well, but I got major headaches from that stuff. My teacher was weird, and it was just boring. I didn’t like it very much at all. Then my dad took me to a Santana show and I was like, ‘That’s it! I’m giving up classical, I’m done with it.’ He played ‘Europa’ and those opening notes just hit me like lightning and I went, ‘There’s something there.’ I learned probably every Santana song. I watched Carlos play a lot; he doesn’t always use a pick. Especially sometimes when you want the note to sound a little sweeter and have less attack. But then to be honest with you, I lose my picks so much that I learned to play without a pick because there’s like this vortex of socks and guitar picks somewhere, all of mine that go missing. I get bowls of guitar picks and they just go. I don’t know if my cat eats them [laughs].”
Orianthi's New Album "Rock Candy" is out now!!!
In a pared-down duo situation, Orianthi gets sweet sounds using her pick-hand fingers to articulate melodies on a PRS hollowbody.
Hear him recount his musical journey, from initially attempting the violin to ultimately discovering his passion for guitar. He also delves into the transformative power of music, highlighting the need to transcend conscious thought while playing, and spotlights his collaboration with Smith in designing this model, which includes a versatile EQ system that McLaughlin puts to the test.
In a broader sense, this PRS Private Stock instrument celebrates John’s storied history in music, from his groundbreaking jazz-fusion solo work, his leadership of the influential band The Mahavishnu Orchestra and partnership in the just-reunited Shakti, and his many collaborations through the years, with Carlos Santana, Miles Davis, Tony Williams, and Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucia, among others. In this video, McLaughlin expresses his gratitude for the opportunity to have a signature guitar (his first, at age 81!) and his deep connection to the instrument.
Highlights:
- John McLaughlin discusses the significance of discipline and love in achieving mastery on a musical instrument.
- McLaughlin recounts his journey from violin to piano, and finally to guitar, revealing his profound attachment to the instrument.
- He emphasizes the attention to detail and craftsmanship of PRS guitars, as well as the collaborative process with Paul Reed Smith.
- McLaughlin explores the transformative nature of music, urging musicians to move beyond conscious thought while playing.
- The innovative EQ system on McLaughlin's signature guitar is praised for its expanded tonal variety, and demonstrated through a wide variety of sounds.
PRS Private Stock John McLaughlin Limited-edition Electric Guitar - Charcoal Phoenix/Smoked Black
“Playing music is a way of being. Playing an instrument requires you to move out of the normal level of consciousness. If you’re thinking, you’re not playing. If you’re playing, you’re not thinking. If you have problems with your instrument, you’re not going to move out of the thinking zone and into your own world. This is why I love my guitar. For me, it’s perfect.” – John McLaughlin
The PRS Private Stock John McLaughlin is a classic instrument that has been meticulously spec’d by Paul Reed Smith to honor John McLaughlin. All of the woods were specially chosen by Smith for their tone, figure, and weight. The specs are fairly straightforward: maple top, mahogany back, hormigo neck (a tone wood used on marimbas for sound-producing tines) with an African blackwood fretboard, 22 frets, 25” scale length, Pattern neck, PRS’s patented Gen III tremolo, and PRS Phase III tuners.