Why are My Guitar Leads Always Tangled? The Number 1 Tip You Need to Know for Rolling Cables

Hey guys, you're in the studio with Luke from www.GuitarIQ.com. Today we're talking about a way to keep your guitar cables tangle free. This tip has to do with the way we roll our cables up in the first place. Why am I doing a video on rolling up guitar cables, it's pretty simple right? Well yes and no... You need to remember that guitar cables are essentially the life line between what we are playing on the guitar and what people are actually hearing, so we want to make sure we're using good quality cables, we want to take care of them and we want to spend the least amount of time possible untangling them every time we go to use them! One really popular technique for rolling up cables, which is actually quite counterproductive, is to roll the cable in the same direction between our thumb and finger as we make loop around our hand, I'm just doing this really small to demonstrate. This often does feel like the way our cables want to naturally go and we do end up with a nice looking loop but as you can see when I unravel this we've actually just introduced twists into our cable in the process of rolling it up. So we're actually tangled before we even start. The alternate method, which I'll talk you through in a second, is very similar but this time we'll introduce a bit of a counter-balance in every second roll so that when we go to pull this apart it unravels easily, tangle free. Amazing. The way this works is that we start in the same way, with the end of our guitar lead in our hand facing towards us, making sure there's no twists in the cable to start with. We then make our first loop rolling the cable forward between our thumb and finger. But this time, on the next loop, we want to roll the cable in the opposite direction so that the cable folds in on itself. Then we simply repeat that process until we reach the end of the cable; create a loop rolling the cable away from us, then fold the cable in on itself rolling towards us. We want to keep the overall size reasonably compact but not too tight. At this point we would obviously use some velcro or something to keep this from unraveling. Try this one out for yourself. If your cable is used to being rolled a certain way it may take a bit of time for it to behave properly, but persist with it and see how you go. This doesn't mean you'll never get tangles in your cables again but it does give you a much better staring point. As always, make sure you subscribe to the channel for more content. If the video has helped you out click on the like button or leave some feedback. You can also connect with the channel on Facebook or Google+, all of the links will be in the description. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.