Nothing freaks out a live sound engineer more than hot-plugging your instruments.  But I use this cable in conjunction with my Boss TU-2 pedal to kill my signal.  When I play live, I usually bring a few guitars along with me.  Different songs call for different sounds, right?  So in the middle of my set, I might switch guitars.  Although I give warning to my live sound engineers that I'll be doing this throughout the set with signal killing switches in place, this still freaks them out when I unplug my cable.  It's kind of funny to watch them freak out in the back of the club and pull my fader all the way down.  The sad part is that they never put me back up to where I was, so my guitar ends up being much quieter than the rest of the band.