It was the great Greek physicist Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and I’ll break your keytar.” In my experience, a cable like this is pretty much guaranteed to break a jack like that, which is why in the time of the pyramids, they invented cables like this. But wait, where you’re likely to run into trouble is with a specialty cable like this. I wanted to talk about vocoders, but none of it’s broken.
This is the cable I’ve been using to do all the connections in my studio recently. It’s like a knockoff of your standard Belden 9451 or whatever. If you’re curious, this one’s a Westpen 454.
It’s a 22 gauge and you can get 1,000 feet of it for like 150 bucks or so. I’m finding it far easier to deal with individual strands than piles of multi-channel snake that are never quite cut to the right size. And not only is it really cheap once you invest in 1,000 foot spool of wire, but there’s this added benefit in that the cable itself is quite stiff.
It’s designed to make it easy to pull through tight spaces. And while it’s not ideal for something like a patch cable or a guitar cable, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But I’m also discovering this kind of secondary benefit in that for making cables, that extra bit of stiffness comes in really handy.
(drill whirring) And you can create some strain relief ’cause it holds its shape. Next up, Let’s talk about VOCALERS.
