Instrument & microphone cables · built one at a time
Custom guitar and XLR cables, built one at a time on Canare Star Quad and Neutrik — the kind you buy once, coil ten thousand times, and hand down with the guitar. Guaranteed, in writing, for a hundred years.
A word on construction
Somewhere in every long cable run there's a ghost — a sixty-cycle hum, a radio station bleeding through, the hiss of a room that won't sit still. Straylight is the name we gave that ghost, and the thing we built to put it down. Four conductors in two diagonal pairs, every bit of interference cancelled before it reaches your amp. Then it's soldered by hand, coiled, and tested twice — the way they don't anymore.
The conductors run in two diagonal pairs, so interference hits each pair equally and cancels out. L-4E6S for XLR · GS-6 for instrument.
A dense served-copper shield wraps the core — quiet, and flexible enough to coil for twenty years without a crack.
Strain-relieved Neutrik ends, soldered by hand. Gold contacts on request. No crimps. No glue.
Each cable gets a number on the sleeve and a line in the book. That number is your guarantee — it follows the cable, not the receipt.
A basement in February. One lamp, one amp warming up in the corner, the smell of hot tubes and old carpet. This is the cable you reach for without looking — low-capacitance Canare that hands every bit of your top end to the speaker, exactly as you played it. It will outlive the amp. It may outlive the basement.
A church hall with the heat off, a ribbon mic, and a singer who only nails it on the take you almost didn't roll. Balanced Star Quad turns its back on the fluorescent buzz and the AM station down the road, so the only thing that reaches the desk is the performance. Dead quiet at fifty feet. Especially at fifty feet.
Made in Montana
Our bench sits under the Mission Mountains in western Montana, where the peaks come straight up out of the valley and the weather does as it pleases. It's a good place to make things meant to last.
A cable from this shop can ride a tour van over a frozen pass, get coiled with cold hands, and come out sounding like the morning it was built — rugged and beautiful, in that order, the way the mountains are. Rugged isn't a word we borrowed for the website. It's the view out the window.
47°37′ N · 113°56′ W — Mission Valley, Montana
The guarantee
A hundred years. In writing. Kinked by a road case, crackling after a thousand gigs, cut clean in half by a careless boot — send it back and we fix it or build you a new one.
It doesn't matter whether you bought it, borrowed it, or inherited it — the guarantee follows the number stamped on the sleeve. It will outlast the band. It may outlast the marriage. It will certainly outlast you, which is rather the point.
★ Every cable numbered, signed, and logged ★
Tell us what you need
Tell us the length and the ends. Tell us the venue that ate your last one, the tone you're chasing, the bass player you mean to impress. We'll write back with a price and the number your cable will carry — usually by morning.
The arithmetic
$10 an end · $1 a foot
A twenty-foot guitar cable with two plain ends comes to $40. Fancier ends — Neutrik Silent, locking, gold — cost a little more. Email and we'll send the exact figure.