Everything made has a design inspiration. Sometimes it is literal: A coil wrapped cable has probably been around for as long as straight ones (telephone cords, for instance). Sometimes it is a certain curve like something else (think Statocaster® which was inspired by the body of women). The coil instrument cable goes back to the 50’s but gained its first round of popularity in the late 60s-early 70s. That high roll-off worked for the time with the pickups and amps and the like at that time. Also, given geniuses who seem to change the law of physics completely and make the most incredible sound from something that should be so ugly, the coil has since been associated with ‘cool’.
Years ago an old cool cat from Woodstock, NY showed me pics of a couple of handmade coily cables in stripes after he got a hold of the Bullet Cable in 2005. He said that they were made for Jimi but they never made it into his hands because… Well he didn’t remember the exact reason why, but ok cool old hippie dude, we get the whole 69′s Woodstock-thing, and maybe it was that the trip made possible by the yellow sunshine squares possibly got in the way?
So this is the pic, I recently found, that was the original cable. It is in red, white, and black stripe.
I remember getting the picture back in 2006ish. It blew my mind. I am always into finding new challenges to making our cable more interesting, and so I took the problem to my factory and asked, “How do we make this possible?” Some people are quick to forget that just because they see it all over the place now, we are constantly starting from scratch here at Bullet Cable. Tip to tip our cables are absolutely, 99.9999% custom. (We use Neutrik® connectors on our Bullet Cable Black Market speaker cables, this being one of the only components we have not designed.)
The stripes from our cool-old-hippie dude friend being the inspired look, having to re-create the stripe was a daunting manufacturing challenge. There were numerous factors to get through and it wasn’t just about make a stripe, it was keeping the stripe consistent and making it from a pvc material that is our own formula. There was a Rastafarian version we did, but just couldn’t get it put into mass production. There was also a glow in the dark one that we were pretty confident in (and that even still is listed on our coil packaging), but again, we could make a few but could not produce a significant mass of many (maybe we will try again in the future). But after modifying machines and changing some of the ways that pvc was poured into the machines, we finally got something that we could do in two colors. One was the black & white stripe which sells pretty successfully in our shop.
After mastering our black & white tests, we made one more: The red and white stripe was inspired by The White Stripes. ‘Icky Thump’ was really hardcore 70’s riff and it seemed appropriate for what we were trying to do. I also have a history of loving their earlier work: I mean dude, “Seven Nation Army” from the Elephant release was just fantastic. Oddly enough a few years after this cable was out Jack White’s manager bought some of our coily cables for Jack and his family.
Okay, so lessons learned: (1) There were some major innovative things happening back in the “old-hippie-days” that were mind blowing enough to put our own design processes to the test and give as an honestly good challenge.; (2) designing something simple is not an end result but a tough-ass process; (3) Jimi was the man, and I can’t help but constantly be inspired by the music he made and the things inspired by the way he played.
The Bullet Cable Multi-Stripe Coil cables are 30′, which straight/ angle connectors, and are available in our shop.
