building diy cable, need a little help

[theloniusjones]

hey everyone - i'm building some cables for my home studio after reading some posts about it here. i bought neutrik connectors and canare cable. i'm planning to start with unbalanced cables for guitars and bass. i was getting ready to put them together and realized the cable i bought, canare L-2T2S, was not what i expected. it has 2 wires inside of the braided shielding. it's called 2 connector cable and i was thinking they meant one internal wire and the shielding. i thought i would be connecting the braided shielding to the ground and the wire to the other pole. i'm thinking that the cable i bought is actually for trs balanced connectors, but i want to make cables with unbalanced ts connectors. can i just cut the extra internal wire, or should i solder it along with the shielding to the ground? would either of these cause noise or possible shorts? i'm new to building cables, so any help would be great.
thanks!
tim

 

[Track Rat]

You can safely float the extra conductor, no problem. If the cable you bought has a foil shield and drain wire, it'll work for instruments and unbalanced line level connections just fine but be warned it won't take a lot of handling very well. The foil shield will come apart inside the cable after a while.

 

[frederic]

Canare, good stuff.

Like Trackrat said, you can leave the "spare" conductor hanging, or cut it short, so it doesn't interfere with the connectors.

Or, you could be fancy

On the guitar end:
Connect the darker colored wire to "tip" on the phone plug.
Connect the lighter colored wire to "ground" on the phone plug.

On the amp end:
Connect the darker colored wire to "tip".
Connect the lighter colored wire to "ground".
Connect the shielding or the drain wire to "ground" also.

Then you wrap a piece of electrical tape around the amp phone plug so you know which way the patch cord goes. Plug it the wrong way, and its "normal". Plug it the other way, you will reduce your noise just a little.

 

[theloniusjones]

wow, thanks for the replies frederic and track rat. frederic - i'll try that out for the guitar cables. 2 of the cables i'm making are unbalanced for connecting my powered monitors to my audio interface (m-audio firewire, which has only unbalanced outputs even though the speakers can take balanced or unbalanced). should i use the same technique there also? which would be the end with the shielding connected? or, as track rat mentioned that the foil will loosen over time, should i just connect one wire to the tip and the other wire to ground for the speaker cables and not use the foil? thanks so much for the help.