Anyway, I sent messages to both Lenny Kravitz and Eric Johnson that part of the secret to getting great tone was using weaker pickups and coil cables. The coil cables add a lot of capacitance and inductance to your signal chain, therefore, when you’re playing through a Marshall, you’re cutting back on the high frequencies. When we were doing the In Step album with Stevie, I had an endorsement with Monster Cables. They would send me all of this free stuff and I was very excited because I could manage these things for a guy like Stevie, who really didn’t even know how to wash dishes. All he knew how to do was play the guitar, but God bless him for that, because he really did something with what he knew. Anyway, I took these cables we got to Stevie and he said, “I hate these things.” I asked him, “Why, man, they’re the best cables in the world?” He said, “They pass to much electricity.” Those were his exact words, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. “They pass too much electricity.”

They were too efficient…

Yeah, so he sent me out to the local Radio Shack and told me to buy every gray coil cord they had – not the black ones, only the gray ones. And I thought, “Hhmm, this freakin’ hick from Dallas is telling me this?” I got them and ran them through my capacitance meter and found out that they added like almost .05 mfd to the signal chain. That made it sound solid – it was like having a tone control, and the brightness and harshness that the Marshalls had was eliminated. There isn’t a single picture of Hendrix… back then they already had high-end cables, but there isn’t a single picture of Hendrix where you see him playing with a straight cable. Why? This is something I brought up to Eric Johnson – whether he heard me or not I don’t know, but it could be the second coming of coil cables.

Coiled cheap cables for guitar is one thing, but using cheap cables in a venue is completely different. First, you aren't going for "coloring" the sound, you are trying to transparently bring what is on the stage to the audience. Making it sound like they are onstage with them. Also, a venue has lots of different acts coming in, over and over. You want cables that are going to last, and are going to pass through electricity efficiently. 30 feet is pretty long, and to get a really less powerful signal just means you'll be adding more gain at the mixer, and ontop of that raising the floor noise.

I've never had a problem with my Procos and my Whirlwind. I can't speak to the quality of Hosa cable, but I can tell you their connectors are cheap and prone to breakage. I've had to replace a lot of them over the years.

The Monster Cable thing is pure snake oil. I will hand it to them, though, they have done a very good job of maintaining a mystique to go with their hefty gross margins.

...and the rest of us got a good chuckle out of it too. :)