124 Guitarist July 2015

124 Guitarist July 2015 GIT395.rev_maker.indd 124 14/05/2015 17:13 Meet youryour maker Leads United If you’ve got top- flight guitars but cheap cabling, you may be throwing away half your tone. We meet Niall Holden of VDC trading – suppliers of Van Damme instrument cables – to learn how to unlock extra tone from your rig, and receive a step-by-step guide to building your own cables into the bargain… Words Jamie Dickson Photography Chris Vinnicombe t’s a chilly day in London and we’re guitars, and has ‘Blackguard’ Teles and that has relatively high capacitance to sitting in the office of Niall Holden, ’54 Strats in his enviable arsenal of smooth some of the sibilant edge off those which he shares with a vintage Vox instruments. So why should guitarists care sharp high frequencies. This was the idea AC30, a Charvel solidbody and a about cable? And what makes the difference behind Van Damme’s Silver Series cables, I Gibson J-200. By his own admission, between a good cable and a great one, as used by Jeff Beck and Gary Moore, which Niall says he set out to be a “rock God” like tonally? “I’ve got Chris Rea’s ’59 Esquire come in three levels of capacitance to suit his hero Jimmy Page at the age of 10, but that he used on The Road To Hell on and On different guitars, as Niall explains. along the way, ended up supplying pro- The Beach. It weighs five-and-a-half pounds “With something like a Strat, you might grade cabling to artists such as Jeff Beck, and you get some volume on it, the whole not necessarily want all the treble that’s Muse’s Matt Bellamy and Coldplay, as well guitar just comes alive,” Niall says. “But if on tap, because it can be quite shrill. So as PRS and Marshall. However, when Niall you start with the right tone, the last thing actually, if you use that guitar with a high- recalls how he started the business with you want to do is plug it into a cable that’s capacitance cable rated at 125pf [picofarads bassist Marcus de Figueiredo back in the instantly going to start bleeding it away.” are the standard unit of measurement for heady late 80s, you’d have to say it doesn’t One of the key points for guitarists to take capacitance], it can sound rounded and sound like the kind of launch that’d make a into account is capacitance, Niall says. fantastic, like instant Stevie Ray Vaughan. bank manager brim with confidence. Capacitance is the electronic phenomenon If you were to plug a Les Paul into that same “We borrowed some money off the bank,” that sees increasing amounts of treble cable, it wouldn’t sound right at all, of Niall recalls. “So the first thing we did was robbed from your tone as cable length course. But, conversely, if you use a low- go on holiday to Rhodes for three weeks. increases, with curly 70s guitar leads being capacitance cable – a 55pf cable – with your We were only going to go for two, but we the classic culprit behind woolly tone. Les Paul, it will sound louder and more alive had such a good time we thought, ‘Oh, well, Increasing awareness of that problem has and you’ll get more tone out of it. We also let’s stay another week.’ So then we came led to ‘low capacitance’ cables being make one that’s in the middle, with a 90pf back and we bought some cars… and after marketed as a panacea for all your tonal ills. capacitance – which, because we’re from that, we only had £128 left because we’d the North, we called the ‘flat cap’.” spent all this money,” he laughs. “It’s not Treble Trouble what I’d recommend to any budding young However, it’s actually more useful to weigh Jacked Up business people, but we got away with it: the up what amount of capacitance suits your The other major points guitarists need to be first invoice we did was for Dave Stewart rig best. After all, if you have a treble -rich aware of are the basic quality and structural and Annie Lennox,” he adds, tellingly. setup – as you might if you used a Fender integrity of their cabling. The apparent Since that hedonistic start, the company Esquire with a ‘Silverface’ Fender Twin, for ‘bling’ of some cables with gold-plated jacks has become one of the biggest and most example – you might actually want a cable can be misleading, Niall argues. trusted names in the business, supplying a bewildering variety of pro -spec cables for everything from Abbey Road’s nearfield “If you start with the right tone, the last thing you monitors, to super yachts. All the same, want to do is plug it into a cable that’s instantly Niall’s heart is still in the world of guitar tone. He’s an avid collector of vintage going to start bleeding it away” Niall Holden July 2015 Guitarist 125 GIT395.rev_maker.indd 125 14/05/2015 17:13 Meet Your Maker Van Damme Cables Niall Holden in his London office, his trusty Gibson J-200 in hand “A lot of the cables you get down the “A lot of the cables you get down the market have market have these nasty jacks that are gold- plated. But it’s microns thin, so the gold’s these nasty jacks that are gold- plated. But it’s not actually that good – it probably needs to microns thin, so the gold’s not actually that good – be nickel. Neutriks [used alongside hefty Switchcraft jacks in Van Damme’s range] it probably needs to be nickel” Niall Holden are great – you can’t really beat a Neutrik connector and especially the ‘Silent’ right - angle ones. They’re about as good as it gets,” Niall adds, referring to connectors that we call it the Van Damme Silver Series the merits of so -called ‘directional’ cabling feature a spring -loaded sleeve that defeats ‘session grade’, because it’s primarily for instruments – cables marketed as being the signal the moment it’s unplugged from designed for someone sitting in the studio, designed to sound better with signal the guitar, thus preventing unwanted not someone like Angus Young running up flowing in a specified direction from guitar buzzes and pops from the trailing jack. and down the stage. So it’s all about the to amp. Pete Cornish, Evidence Audio and “And, of course, then you’ve got things like play-off between supple handle-ability, other respected, high-end cable firms do handle-ability – you’ve got to be able to coil coil ability, and how they sound.” make such cables, but Niall argues that it’s it,” he adds. “You don’t want to be moving more relevant to hi-fis than guitar rigs. across a stage and find the cable is kinking Damme Fine Speaking of high-end hi-fi gear, Niall because it’s got ‘memory’. He says the But he acknowledges that many players acknowledges that the one-upmanship of company’s standard XKE instrument cables like to decide exactly what that balance of the audiophile world can take people down are designed to be easy to use and sound attributes should be themselves, and to some pretty exotic rabbit holes, where even good in typical gigging and studio that end, Van Damme offers a free service the basic principle of getting maximum applications. But as you move into the that allows players to customise every bang for your buck is rather turned on its realms of specialist high-performance detail of instrument cables ordered from head. “One of the biggest complaints that cables, there are some handling trade -offs the company’s website. we get on hi- fi forums about Van Damme to consider. “With the low -capacitance However, while Van Damme puts a lot of cabling is that it’s not expensive enough!” cables, because of the physical nature of the research into optimising its cables’ tonal he concludes, with a shrug. design, it’s quite a thick cable. That’s why qualities, Niall isn’t personally convinced by www.vdctrading.com 126 Guitarist July 2015 GIT395.rev_maker.indd 126 14/05/2015 17:13.

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