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Been soldering for more than 30 years. Solder oxidizes fast. Clean and tin your iron often. Solder flux is your best friend (next to a clean iron) and should be applied to almost everything before you throw the solder it. Flux removes oxides from metals so that the solder will wet it. A soldering station beats almost any basic iron.

Best of luck to ya!

I've taught dozens of my students how to solder.

My suggestion is that you buy a soldering station from an Amazon seller that takes T12 tips, then buy an assortment of T12 tips. Buy some Kester flux and Kester 63/37 solder.

Good job. Solder is right and White way to fix things.

have you done the rite of passage and grabbed the hot part?

you'll only do that once

oh look up the differences between instrument and speaker cables, they look exactly the same but a speaker cable will add heaps of noise to a guitar signal.

Good decision! I’ve done some electrical /electronics soldering. I still need to learn the plumbing application of it though. also need to learn guitar as well.

I blew up a soul food pedal. I should have fixed it but didn't. That was a good pedal. Have a couple others that are good enough. I have some great guitars, maybe one day I will make time for practice again. 20th anniversary nighthawk is my fav.

Now that you have embarked on this journey, you will never need to buy another cable again for the rest of your life. Further, you can build your own custom snakes for your rig if you do gigs, cutting down setup time. Check out the XLR/Mono/Stereo schematics in google images. Easy as fuck. Then, as you play guitar, ask yourself. What happens if i change the capacitor in my Gipson from the 0.022uf to something else. What if i put 2 caps and then a switch to switch them on the fly? What if i have individual coil cuts for each rail on my humbuckers? What about an in phase switch? Metal glue (solder) opens up the world!

Fix it!

I just reconnected the wires to my PC speakers that I had inadvertently yanked out...

Taught myself. It's pretty easy. Just make sure you learn how to use the braid right.

Im a sparky and wished i had learnt to play guitar. Watch a few videos on YT and have a few practice goes at soldering ,its not hard but, microphone cables are a bitch they are small and have a coating that repels solder. You will need dto gently abrade the wires for the solder to grab so rough up more than you need and trim to suit. Dont let the wires touch each other too

Awesome!

Sounds like you fixed it. Great!

Generally have the wires held in place mechanically with pliers or whatever such that they are held together without your effort. Then you can deal with the iron and solder.

Have plenty of ventilation and a small fan that blows the vapors away from you.

That shouldn't be too hard. Basically it's impossible to fuck that up. You can just go a little more pro then is strictly necessary with a few tips.

Tip one is to pre-tin your wires. That's where you put a very small amount of the solder on each wire without connecting them. That way when you do the completed job the wires already have made some contact with solder which helps prevent the solder from sticking more to one wire than the other. Both wires are basically ready to wick in more.

The next suggestion is to try to get the wires to touch properly. Electricity that goes from wire to wire directly with some solder around it is better than using your solder as a conductor. Remember that solder is like a glue. If you were gluing wood if there was a large gap bewteen your planks that were unclamped and that gap were filled with glue it wouldn't be that structurally sound. So if your wires somehow end up gapped in a matrix of solder, not as good.

The third suggestion can go against the pre-tinning suggestion partially and depending. If you have a good length of wire there are wire wrapping techniques that can really secure two wires together well. If you can get the wires such that they are secure even without solder and then solder that, that's good. But in order for the wires to have pliability for those techniques you may have to tin very lightly or sometimes not at all. Tinning lighting is the ideal. Sometimes if you tin only one side of the wire you still have the pliability needed but you also have that seed of solder for the wire to accept more.

Next pro-tip which is a little more mandatory is get some heat shrink tubing. It's cheap on amazon. Then you can cover up the exposed wires way better than using electrical tape. I did the electrical tape for many years. It's so dumb. It's not even worth doing it that way once. Just get the heat shrink tubing now. The biggest real cost is the delay working on your project while waiting for it. Worth putting your project in the drawer for a few days to wait for that.