The wires. Keyboards have them, guitars and basses need them, and even drums have them (the snare). Everyone but the singer, who gets to be wireless, is at the mercy of them. Some singers keep the wire as a prop. I cannot imagine Roger Daltrey with a wireless mic. For some reason, we musicians hate our wires except for the ones we tune then strum and bend. They are a pain, frankly—an awkward tether when trying to be free.

I remember one of my first high-end guitar cables (wires) seemed to be the last coiled cable ever made. I say that because I was the last person to be seen playing one outside a vintage rock documentary. My coiled cable was heavy and only about two-feet long. But when I plugged it in to my amp and guitar, I could stretch it out a good 25 feet—of which not a single inch ever touched the ground. It almost killed the singer on more than one occasion and eventually the band sat me down and gave me an ultimatum—get a proper straight cable or get out (though we can still borrow your PA, right mate?).  

Needless to say, I bought a straight cable, and after years of lugging around as a backup the six or seven pounds of tightly wound, thickly insulated copper wire with telephone jacks on either end, the coiled cable was finally abandoned. I think it was at a bar outside Gustine. It was so ruggedly industrial I bet it’s still in use somewhere as a makeshift thingy. Towns like Gustine thrive on makeshift thingies.                              

My next adventure in cabling was at some weird pro audio dealer-sponsored show at a hotel near LAX. We were in some room, hired by some company, and we played our set over and over as people filtered through, checked out the chick singer, and then left when they realized her clothes were staying put. This was in the ’90s when female singers kept their clothes on. Now it seems they don’t even bother to take them to the gig. And that is supposed to be empowering (to what, my adolescent fascination with nippled things?). I digress, but so do half the acts in the Hot 100.

So while we were playing this quasi-tradeshow gig, our sound guy leaves during a break and comes back with four furlongs worth of instrument cables. Each one was so brightly colored they had stripper names like Chartreuse and Deep Cerise. The cables were of fine quality. And the myriad of colors were great—if it were still the ’80s! It’s like the company who made them came up with a great idea for a cable in 1986 but didn’t release it until 1996 when everything was dull plaid and fern green. I felt bad for the company, so we kept the cables and promised to use them—which we did and I still do today. This is why I am known as the guy with the electric lime cable. (Or is it spring bud?) 

Back in the ’90s, I had briefly abandoned the electric hot deep cable scene in an effort to ditch the wires that I did not pluck. Boss had come out with a low-end wireless system for poor sots like me. (If poor sot is not a color name, it ought to be—sort of “feldgrau” meets “raw umber”—or is Raw Umber a stripper name? It gets confusing…) Anyway, this budget-wise wireless system (it was plain old black) was cheap but held the promise of me walking on stage and playing through invisible wires! Using this wireless system on stage is how I learned about a little thing called frequency range—something this wireless system utterly lacked. I still have a VHS of me chucking the basic black wireless system against the club’s brick wall and snapping in a nice Gamboge 18-footer to finish the night.

The last cable given to me by a company lit up. It required AC power and the nicest thing I can say about it is that it kind of felt like I was inserting one of those cheap, ultra crap (you guessed it—color name!) garden hoses into my lovely guitar.

Recently, my friends at E-MU hooked me up with their answer to this cable problem—an interesting new product called PIPEline. It is designed for pro audio, so naturally I plugged it right into my non-pro home theater system and it worked straight away. I will say this: Its price ($100 per unit; you need two, one to transmit and one to receive) beats the painful struggle of discreetly stringing speaker wire all over your living room. Of course, being wireless, it does not transmit a powered signal; if it did, it would have stunning death ray capabilities. And while intriguing, death rays do not belong in the living room or even on stage. Hence, wireless digital audio devices like PIPEline require an amp on the receiver side if you want to push the signal through speakers. PIPEline does have enough oomph for headphones, however, and it works great between line level devices. I used it in between my guitar processor’s line out and my audio interface’s line in, and I was up in the time it took to dig out and run a cable. I was expecting latency, frankly, but didn’t feel it, let alone hear it, when playing. And in spite of a strong wireless DSL antenna between the two devices, I got no EMF or other unseen disturbances in the force. I was pleasantly surprised at how good it sounds (PIPEline has the nebulous spec of “Better Than CD” quality), and there was no noticeable difference between using PIPEline or using a cable (regardless of color). I would like to have gone digital straight off, but alas, S/PDIF cables are not included—either unit can be used as a transmitter or receiver, and it has a broadcast mode where you can send the signal from one to many units. The form factor is simple and discrete with a finish that boasts no fancy color name (it’s white). The possibilities are endless—from punking your roommate to personal stage monitors, from flash mob instrumentals to use as a digital to analog (or vice versa) convertor. The form factor works for personal stage use, and it comes with a Wii-like prophylactic that clips on to your singer’s underwear. Using PIPEline for wireless guitar requires additional hardware to settle the impedance—that is certainly no show-stopper, but pick one up on your way out of the store. I’m hoping E-MU bundles one with a dedicated set of cables for us guitar players.

Wireless digital audio is a growing market, and I expect it to become the norm as the nuisance of hard wiring cannot compete with high-quality sound from affordable devices such as E-MU’s PIPEline. Sound guys won’t be throwing away their snakes just yet. And there is just too much wattage in touring rigs to dump their cables. But for anyone who listens to music and many of us who make it in front of other people, this is a very cool and properly unobtrusive piece of gear. If only it came in han blue…

Read past installments of Riot Gear!:

Drummer Replacement: My New 90-Piece Kit 

St. Paul the Electric 

Part II: King Crimson’s Adrian Belew