We guitarists are finicky about our guitar tone and for good reason. From the strings you play to the amp you use, it all has an effect on your tone. With the best guitar cables, your hard-fought sound will be transferred with maximum sound quality and a minimum of noise.
A good cable will put up with plenty of abuse, reliably delivering your sound whether you’re playing in your bedroom or at your local venue. We all enjoy hunting down the sound in our heads, trying out different combinations of components to find that holy grail of guitar tone, and it shouldn’t stop at your guitar cables either. And at a time when finding the funds for a more expensive addition to your guitar rig is harder to do, upgrading a more budget-friendly component such as your cable can do wonders for your tone as well as your bank balance.
If you'd like to read more about the best guitar cables, then we've included some in-depth buying advice at the end of this guide. Click the link to take you there. If you'd rather just get straight to the products, then keep scrolling.
Best guitar cables: Guitar Player’s choice
Our top spot goes to the Mogami Gold guitar cable (opens in new tab), the gold standard of guitar cables. These offer fantastic sound transfer, top quality connectors, and are backed by a lifetime warranty – which speaks volumes about their reliability. This is a premium guitar cable with the price tag to match, but the extra investment is well worth the extended lifespan and low noise level.
The Fender Professional Series (opens in new tab) is hard to beat if you’re looking for a more budget-friendly option. Its rugged build quality ensures it will put up with plenty of abuse on stage, while its stiff construction prevents unwanted tangling.
Best guitar cables: Product guide
The Mogami Gold Series cable is widely regarded as the best guitar cable on the market for good reason, regularly topping best-of lists thanks to its high-quality construction and excellent sound transfer.
It features a heavy gauge, oxygen-free copper core with an ultra-high density spiral shield, which means a minimum of interference in your guitar signal. To help with the noise reduction, the outer cable construction is conductive carbon-impregnated PVC.
It comes in an array of lengths to meet the needs of everyone from bedroom warrior to the regularly touring musician, and when something comes with a lifetime warranty, you know it means business.
Manufactured to the same exacting standards as the company's guitars and amps, Fender Professional Series cables provide players with a cost-effective option for all their cabling needs, whether you need to wire up a pedalboard or plug in on a large stage.
The wide gauge of this cable offers a reassuring feel, despite its low price compared to some of the other cables on this list. The outer PVC jacket also has a ‘physical memory’ to prevent it from getting tangled, no matter how badly you wrap it up after rehearsal.
Featuring 95% OFC spiral shielding, it reduces unwanted noise and interference to a minimum, transparently delivering your guitar tone. Available in a huge number of lengths, you won’t have to look far to find one of these to meet your needs.
Ernie Ball Braided Cables eschew the tired old black cable aesthetic for something far edgier. Ensuring excellent sonic transfer, these high-quality cables offer excellent durability and look great whilst doing it.
Braided cables are far more resistant to tangling than their PVC-covered cousins while also offering a reliability upgrade due to the hardy exterior. This means these cables will be more than adequate to stand up to the use and abuse of life on the road.
Dual conductors reliably transfer your guitar tone clearly with crisp highs, tight mids and rich harmonics. It’s a very well shielded cable that delivers a minimum of interference and susceptibility to extraneous noise.
Planet Waves by D’Addario has been manufacturing guitar cables for a long time now, so it knows a thing or two about making a cable that can put up with the rigors we guitar players like to put them through.
Geo Tip connectors, manufactured by Neutrik, ensure a rock steady connection, no matter what kind of guitar you play. The connectors use HelioFused soldering to connect the inner cabling for added reliability.
This is a low capacitance, audiophile-grade cable for transparent tone transfer, with an oxygen-free copper conductor for exceptional signal transfer. It utilizes 95% tinned copper braiding, virtually eliminating noise and interference.
When you’ve got endorsements from Dave Gilmour, Jeff Beck and Guthrie Govan, you know you’re doing something right. Evidence Audio’s Lyric HG guitar cable is a premium offering for guitarists that take their tone seriously.
The dual solid core is made of refined IGL copper which is what gives this cable its incredibly transparent tone transfer, as well as its stiff construction. This cable features Neutrik connectors and TRT Wonder Solder so it will put up with plenty of strain.
It’s hard to fathom the effect a guitar cable can have on your sound, but we saw a noticeable difference using these cables. There was more body and definition in our guitar tone with plenty of bite and attack once the break-in period was through.
Boss Instrument Cables offer outstanding value for money, giving you a cable that’s reliable and durable without costing the earth. Boss has a great reputation for build quality, which is comforting when buying a guitar cable.
A studio-grade, oxygen-free copper core delivers transparent tone transfer, whether you’re going straight to your guitar amp or wiring up a pedalboard. The 24K gold-plated contacts have been custom designed for maximum sound reproduction.
The durable braided exterior prevents any unwanted tangling whilst further enhancing the reliability of this cable. Available in a wide variety of lengths, as well as the solderless pack for wiring your pedalboard, this is one of the best value guitar cables you can buy today.
George Lewis made his name selling cable in bulk, allowing guitar players to custom spec lengths for their particular needs. This ready-made version of George L’s cable means you can get that renowned sound instantly.
Low capacitance is the name of the game here, giving you probably the best value per meter on the market today. This means you get an incredibly clear guitar tone, and when switching from higher capacitance cables you’ll feel like a veil has been taken off your amp speaker.
The gauge of the cable is very thin, which makes it particularly lightweight but still incredibly durable. It is somewhat susceptible to tangling when longer lengths are used, but the quality of tone transfer more than makes up for it.
When a cable carries a lifetime warranty and the Fender brand name, you know it means business. Despite not being the first name that comes to mind when you think of cables, these are extremely high quality.
Custom-molded 24-karat gold-plated connectors deliver a solid and reliable connection, strong enough to put up with plenty of abuse. It’s a thick-gauge cable too, which feels nice and solid, working in tandem with the braided jacket to prevent any unwanted tangling.
Excellent shielding prevents interference from clouding your pristine guitar tone, while there are various different size options, from pedalboard-friendly sizes all the way to 25-foot lengths that will cover the biggest stages.
Harking back to a bygone era, the coiled guitar cable has seen a recent rejuvenation amongst modern guitarists thanks to its unique tonal quality. With a high-quality design and superior components, this cable oozes the vintage aesthetic.
As famously used by Jimi Hendrix, the coiled cable results in a slightly tempered high-end thanks to its long length. This makes them great for pairing with certain single-coil pickups, reducing any harsh top end.
Ernie Ball uses several shielding materials in the construction of this cable, ensuring it rejects interference and unwanted noise. Meanwhile, a durable PVC jacket makes certain it will put up with the abuse that comes from life on the road.
As well as making high-quality guitars, PRS also offers a premium guitar cable that’s handmade in London. Made in tandem with Van Damme Cabling, you’re getting a serious guitar cable here, one that’s used by the Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and many more.
This cable features Neutrik connectors, which are probably the most reliable on the planet, so you know it’s going to put up with plenty of abuse. The cable is lightweight thanks to the small diameter but still retains a premium feel to match its price.
A carefully tuned capacitance value means your guitar tone remains bright and crystal clear. It’s available in various lengths with right angle and straight jack options, plus you can upgrade to silent connectors for additional investment.
MXR’s Pro Series guitar cable offers the outstanding build quality you’d expect from any subsidiary of Jim Dunlop, one of the great guitar accessory manufacturers. This means this cable comes with a guarantee of long life and reliable performance.
A high-quality, 24 AWG oxygen-free copper center conductor delivers your tone reliably and transparently, whilst the 19-strand spiral shielding prevents any unwanted noise from entering your signal chain.
The PVC jacket is flexible, yet still firm enough to assist in preventing any unwanted tangling or kinks. It’s extra thick so will put up with you standing on it repeatedly just as easily as it will with frequent coiling and uncoiling.
The second coiled cable offering on this list, this time from vintage leviathans Vox, certainly inspires a classic rock aura. Modeled after a classic design, this cable has featured in many iconic moments in rock history.
To get around the dreaded ‘tone suck’ coiled cables allegedly have on your tone, Vox uses a 99.9% purity, oxygen-free copper conductor to help prevent the loss of high end associated with these cables.
This cable also features a unique multi-gauge design. Individual conductor types are optimized for particular frequency ranges, which means you get a natural and organic-sounding guitar tone, great for vintage-lovers and modern players alike.
Best guitar cables: Buying advice
What to know when shopping for the best guitar cable
When buying the best guitar cable, you’d be forgiven for just grabbing the first one you see and being done with it. We get it, it’s not the most exciting thing in the world. The more you understand about how cables are constructed, however, the more you’ll understand the potentially unwanted effects cheap cables can have on your guitar tone. Budget guitar cables can introduce unwanted noise into your signal chain and their connectors often fail, usually at a most inopportune moment such as when you’re mid-way through your set. Save yourself the faff, and add a high-quality guitar cable to your rig.
The first thing you’ll want to look at is the connector. This is where a guitar cable is most likely to fail, so having a high-quality connector is a must if you want the best reliability and tone transfer. Neutrik connectors are amongst the best in the world, so keep an eye out for cables with these kinds of connectors as you know you’ll be getting a quality product. Your connector is subject to the highest stresses out of all the components in your guitar cable. Constant plugging and unplugging as well as the potential for pressure to be applied by accidentally stepping on your cable or catching it in something means that a top-quality connector is key.
Does cable length matter?
Cable length is also incredibly important. The longer a cable, the larger its effect on your tone. When your signal passes along the length of a cable, some is inevitably lost along the way, which results in some high-end sound loss when long cable lengths are used. This isn’t necessarily a negative, however – Jimi Hendrix swore by the longer length of coiled cables as he liked the slight cut of top-end from his signal, so if you’ve got a guitar that is particularly treble-heavy, a longer cable might actually help your guitar tone.
What on earth is capacitance?
Lastly, another buzzword you’ll hear in relation to the best guitar cables is capacitance. Without delving too much into the science, capacitance is the relationship between two conductors, i.e. the jack plugs on your guitar. As we mentioned previously, one of the ways this is affected is the length of the cable, the other is the materials used. Typically more expensive guitar cables use better materials and shielding, and thus have a lower capacitance, meaning less of an effect on your guitar tone.
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Matt is a freelance writer at Guitar Player, Thomann.de, Guitar World, MusicRadar and many more music and gear-related publications. Having played guitar for 20 years, it's fair to say he knows a thing or two about the humble six-string, and you'll most likely find him in the rehearsal studio, hunched over caveman-style, tweaking settings on his pedalboard. Matt currently plays in Manchester-based alt-rockers JACKALS and when he's not at his guitar, he likes to spend his time in his home studio with his two cats, collaborating on alternative hip-hop tracks with fellow creatives from the North-West of England.
