Before we talk about choosing the best guitar wire, let’s go over some of the most common types that are used, and which kind might be best for you. Because there are so many available options, it can be challenging to choose the right wire. We’ll break it down so you can choose the best type for your particular needs.
Most wire is composed of copper, but aluminum is also another popular metal that’s used. Platinum, iron, silver, and gold are also available options, but less commonly used.
Silver is the most conductive, but its high cost makes it impractical for use as a wire for most purposes. Copper follows silver in conductivity, and aluminum follows copper. Even though copper is 39% more conductive than aluminum, aluminum is still an excellent conductor, more than suitable for use in electrical wire.
Hookup Wire For Guitar And Bass Electronics And Pickups. 22 Gauge Spool 100 Foot Length Black
Copper weighs about twice as much as aluminum and is currently triple the price. Despite copper making up the vast majority of wire, aluminum will soon get a larger share of use as copper becomes more expensive in the future.
If you’ve ever looked inside a wire, you have probably noticed that some have a solid core, while others have multiple strands. Some wires have multiple strands braided together instead of being placed next to each other.
This kind of wire, as the name suggests, is a single strand of solid wire. Solid core wire can handle a little more current than the same gauge stranded wire, and the thicker solid wire is more resistant to environmental effects.
Pig Hog Speaker Cable 14 Gauge Wire 1/4
We use solid core wire in cases where there is little need for flexibility. For example, we commonly see solid core wire used as jumper wires or bus wires on IC-boards. Interestingly, these are made almost exclusively of aluminum. We also use a lot of solid-core in home-wiring, where we appreciate its higher current property and rarely need to move it once in place.
The multistrand wire is much more common than solid core. The primary reason that we use multistrand wire is that it is more flexible and is less likely to break.
The more strands a wire has, the stronger and more flexible it is. At minimum, all wires have at least seven strands. A seven strand wire is only for applications in which the wire won’t be moved. Nineteen strands is the minimum number recommended for a wire that needs to bend and flex. A wire that needs to flex continuously, such as a headphone wire, can have more than 80 strands.
Best Guitar Wire
Most of the wire that you find in small electronic devices at home will be multistrand. The primary downside to the multistrand wire is that multiple strands provide more surface area that can be damaged by the environment. Exposure can allow corrosion to set in and reduce the conductivity of the metal, causing premature failure.
A secondary downside is the increased cost incurred as you add more strands. A wire containing a hundred or more strands can be significantly more expensive than a solid core of the same size.
Most wires use plastic, rubber, or a push-back cloth insulation to protect it from the elements and to keep it from shorting out. Often the wires will come in an array of colors to act as a visual aid when troubleshooting. There is no real standard to the colors, so use what makes the most sense to you.
Meters) 24 Awg Stranded Wire
Shielding is when we encompass the wire and its insulation in a layer of conductive material, and add a second layer of insulation over the shield. We shield the wire when we need to protect it from RF interference. The shielding traps the noise and shuttles it to ground before it can affect the signal in the main wire. Your guitar cable is shielded.
Aluminum tape is an excellent way to shield your wire. The length of wire is covered using the tape for 100% protection from interference. The downside to an aluminum tape shield is that it’s very flimsy and hard to use. Many people find it difficult to solder the tape to the ground wire and it tends to look sloppy. Some companies try to make aluminum tape more accessible by adding a “drain wire” that can ground the foil.
A secondary downside to using foil is that it can develop microscopic tears that can compromise its ability to shield the main wire.
Guitar Pickup Wire
The second, more common option, is braided wired. As the name suggests, a tube of copper or aluminum wire covers the insulation of the main wire. Braided shielding offers several advantages over the foil shield:
The wire gauge is the diameter of the wire, and the wire gets smaller as the gauge goes up. The gauge determines how much current can pass through the wire and how much resistance increases. A larger wire can pass more current, and a smaller wire adds more resistance.
Using a wire that is too large will only add cost to your project without any benefit. Using a wire that is too small can create too much resistance, which can result in heat and melted wires in some cases.
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Most electric guitar pickups use skinny wires around 42 gauge. The reason the wires are so thin is that the pickups are only producing a tiny amount of electricity and barely any measurable current. So, we don’t need anything bigger than that for any of our wires, and our guitar will work just fine with 42 gauge wire throughout.
However, 42 gauge is pretty thin wire, and many people will feel more comfortable with thicker wires between the volume and tone controls. If you’d like to use thicker wire, something in the 24 to 27 gauge should work well.
The wires often get tugged when changing parts, especially the output jack, so we recommend using stranded wire instead of solid wire. The more strands, the better.
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Using a shielded wire is a personal decision. Most guitars don’t use shielded wire, though it’s definitely within your options to do so. It’s possible to reduce noise by using shielded wire, but the volume and tone pots will remain unshielded. It’s better to coat the entire control cavity with copper tape to prevent interference from entering.
Although there are many options on guitar wire, we recommend unshielded 27 gauge stranded. The insulation — cloth push-back or plastic — doesn’t matter and neither does the color. We hope that this has helped you determine which guitar wire is the best for your instrument use, and that you’ll share this article on Facebook and Twitter. For more articles about guitar electronics, visitWhen looking for the best guitar cable, there are many questions to ask. But typically, people first tend to ask, what is the best guitar cable. And from this point, they get lost in the options, pricing, and specifications.
I wanted to do a breakdown of these areas to help the understanding of features and specifications and what they mean for you. So let's ask a few common questions.
Guitar Cable Recommendations
Or American Wire Gauge. This is what carries your signal from your instrument to the next point of your signal chain. When we talk about cables' pricing, we're generally talking about the copper in the cable. The more copper and the better quality of copper can raise the price. A great gauge for the primary signal conductor is 20 AWG. By having a thicker conductor, you increase the strength of that signal path. Over time, the cable bending and twisted can cause a thinner gauge to break from fatigue.
Is a smelting process of the copper (electrolytically refined). This smelting leads to extremely high-quality copper. The higher quality copper will increase conductivity, and we all want that. Conductivity is the reason we hear our instrument. Again, like our conductor gauge, the OFBC will often bring in a larger price point compared to Bare Copper or BC.
Capacitance. You'll run into this term a lot. Capacitance, or cable capacitance, is when your signal degrades. This degradation is based on the diameter of the cable in relation to the conductor and length of the cable. Okay, that isn't very easy. Let me explain it this way. There is a copper shield protecting the inner conductor. I'll get into shielding next, but the closer the conductor is to the shield, the higher capacitance. The higher capacitance will result in a muddy or darker tone and potential volume loss. Capacitance is also related to the length of the cable. The longer the cable, the higher the capacitance.
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A good guitar cable will want to have the perfect amount of capacitance in the desired length. For example, our Standard instrument cables are 20-25pF (picofarad) / foot. This is tested at 15' feet lengths. A 10' cable is probably 19-21pF, while a 20' cable is in the 22-27pF range. As we get longer, the pF increases.
Thin cables will either have tiny conductor or have higher capacitance. Our instrument cable is thick (.280 diameter) to maintain a strong conductor and have low capacitance.
Shielding. We touched on this above. Shielding is critical for a quality instrument cable. Shielding (or ground) is
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