Your favorite inexpensive patch cables?

The Gator

The Gator

Well-known member
So I haven't bought a lot of cables since 2000. Yeah I know, but I owned a lot of stuff from a music store I worked at for many years and I bought a whole box o' cables back then. Well now it's time for some fresh ones. I really don't need the most ultimate indestructible patch cable. I just need some good patch cables for a good price. So I am open to recommendations and I appreciate your input.

Thanks
~Gator
 
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I got a bunch of solderless plug kits off Amazon for a pretty low price. They're small and haven't failed yet. Kind of got tired of fixing the big old soldered ones.
 
Not sure if you're interested or not but typically I would recommend making your own patch cables. A pack of 20 GLS pancake plugs is $40 on Amazon and of course that's enough for 10 cables. Mogami 2319 or similar is going to be about $0.50 a foot, so for a typical 6" patch cable you'd be looking at about $4.25 each.

Which to be fair is not the cheapest thing in the world. You can get some decent 6" right angle patch cables on Amazon now for about 3 bucks each or thereabouts (broadly speaking, a 6-pack for somewhere around $15-20).

The advantage of course with building your own is that you can be 100% sure of the construction and do as you please for heat shrink or add stuff like techflex if you want...and can do whatever length best suits your situation. If you don't care about any of that then you can certainly get by just fine for cheaper, but if you want things like custom (or even just non-6"/12") lengths or added techflex, etc it starts to get pricey fast. So that's your call there...

That said when it comes to premade stuff my favorite has to be the EBS flat cables. They are also not the cheapest out there but are soooo low profile and generally have held up well in my experience. The short ones are about 4" and I think work out to about $7 each.
 
I do or have done some of all of the above, I usually grab a handful of the cheapies when I'm at a Guitar Store, and honestly haven't had any trouble with those, but rarely does my stuff get moved around. I used George L's solderless back when I was gigging and never had a problem.
 
I get making your own for sure. I make way too many things myself. I might have to just try some of the premade suggestions.
Thank you to all of you for the input!

Gator
 
I've had good results with (I think!) inexpensive MXR patch cables they sell in bulk in a plastic jar at my local store. But for gigging I roll my own with Mogami and Switchcraft. I used to make solderless Lava cables and they worked well as long as you're not constantly plugging/unplugging. But I recently switched to soldering my own, and for some inexplicable reason sometimes they still add more capacitance than they should, so I measure and test all the time.

I was very excited about the marvellously flat EBS patches and bought enough for my rather small board but they removed all high end entirely. Pretty remarkable seeing I used at most five of them. Maybe the new ones are better?

I wouldn't mind going back to the lava cables but I think they've gone broke.
 
George Ls on my static at-home-board that doesn't move had some failures over time. So I stopped using them on my gig-board, too.

I'm slowly phasing out the George Ls as time and money permit for DIY solder ones.
 
I have some pancake ones that are ok but they don’t work for my 1590B builds because the pancake plug gets in the way of the power plug. Can anybody recommend some with a smaller plug?
 
I took StevieJr92's suggestion and bought some of these about 9 months ago. No issues so far. Nice low profile cables.
Pig Hog PHLSK6BK Lil' Pigs Low Profile Right-Angle 1/4" Black Instrument Patch Cables, 6" (4 Pack) https://a.co/d/cdbZZXf
 
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