TRS cables & stomp boxes

daveo1977 · Aug 28, 2015

Hello!

In my neck of the woods, ready-made patch cables seem to be in short supply - the kind you'd use to patch together stomp boxes on a pedal board. My local guitar shop will make me up some, but I have access to TRS cables (that have a stereo input jack) for the weekend.

Will a TRS cable damage a stomp box that usually takes a TS cable (that has a mono input jack)?

Hasie · Aug 28, 2015

Mentioned on one of the Coursera tutorial videos on music production, is that a TSR cable used on a TS port, will work and will also be less prone to noise than a TS cable.

I can't state for a fact that it works that way, as I haven't tried it myself.

daveo1977 · Aug 28, 2015

Thanks Hasie! From what I could gather, when you plug in a mono jack into a stomp box, it completes the circuit when you power a stomp box off batteries. That's why when you plug out the jack from the stomp box, you don't run down the battery any further. The stereo jack is constructed slightly differently, which means that it might not make the same kind of contact that completes the circuit. I use a T-rex fuel tank for pedal power, so I want to be sure that I'm not going to short out my pedals when I plug in a stereo cable.