At my studio, we are putting in wall mounts that will allow some members of the band to play in the live room but have their amp in the booth so the band can all play in the same room. Now we do this by having jacks in the live room and running the wire through the walls to the booth so your guitar would plug into the wall mount jack.
I read up on some instrument cable and it's always best to use the least amount of cable possible (obviously, we all know that), but if you can't avoid it, then run through a DI from your guitar, then to the wall mount, then from the other wall mount in the booth, to another DI and then to the AMP. This way your now running the signal balacned through an XLR cable, instead of an unbalanced TS. whew.
Does anybody know if it would make much of a difference (noticeably less noise) if we used the DI's or not? I mean, the cable we're running will probably only be 10' -15', but unbalanced, and run beside all the other cables (which will be balanced). If we go with using the DI's, then we will change the wall mounts from TRS to XLR jacks.
Thanks
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Guitars are actually affected the most by capacitance and cable
Guitars are actually affected the most by capacitance and cable length. This is because they are high impedance so the roll-off frequency for a given amount of capacitance begins much lower than with a low impedance source.. 15' is the longest I would ever run a guitar cable. Guitar is the one place where I can actually tell big differences between cable types and lengths. In general, the thinner the wire, the lower the capacitance per foot, which means less high-end roll-off, which is good. But you also have to worry about noise with guitar cables, so you need a good shield.
The problem with using long cabes, (way longer than you would ne
The problem with using long cabes, (way longer than you would need), is the issue of cable capacitance. If a cable is very long you start to lose high frequency response proportionate with cable length. 15 feet is not a length to worry about. Especially with guitars as you don't have much going on over 6k. If I were you I would forget about the di's, all except for the last step going into the console. If you have one di in there then the grounded shield on the balanced cable may eliminate interference from devices like lights, computers, amps etc.
In other words, don't worry so much.
Steve.