guitar noise

one of electrics has a very loud buzz when plugged into Guit Rig. I have another electric and it doesn't buzz. My bass doesn't buzz either.

I took the buzzing guit to a tech to have him fix it and while there he plugged it into an amp. no buzz.
So, I figured it must be my cord. 

Tried a bunch of cords and still buzzing.

Also (and this is really weird), when plugged into guit Rig, my bridge pickup tone control effects the neck pickup. But, this didn't happen when plugged into the amp at the store. Everything was perfect.

I have a dimmer switch for the lighting in the room. Could this be it? I turned off the light and still noise.

I'm at a loss here.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks Tom.

Sorry. Humbuckers on both except for a dimagio on the treble side of the noisy guit. 

Except, you got me thinkin. I just checked and the noise drops dramatically when I switch to the dimagio.

I installed all this like 30 years ago. ouch, that's a long friggin time:)

I think the key would be, 
what is the difference between a guit amp and a direct box into a computer into Guit Rig.
I'm just guessin at that though. 

Are you by any chance using a cable with a TRS connector (stereo) instead of mono?
Are you using a line input instead of a high impedance instrument input?

Wilko

My first thought is that your recording environment has lots of noise in it.

2nd thought is that Guitar Rig can have huge amounts of gain... and ALL of it happens AFTER the noise floor from the analog preamp stuff has been added. The amp scenario you describe has most of it's gain happen right at the analog preamp... so a LOT less noise gets amplified.

3rd thought is that a ground connection in that particular guitar is going bad and that your guitar tech hasn't found it yet... which isn't a criticism because that's the nature of trying to fix stuff that isn't completely broke.

I'd ask him to look more closely and hope he finds the problem sooner than later.


best regards,
mike

Sorry Wilko. i didn't know Guit Rig had hardware. (silly me). DOH..

here's a link to the DBox info. (and, yes, it is passive).
http://www.procosound.com/images/stories/DB1_specsheet_1010.pdf


I think you're on to something. However, the fact that my other electric guit is quite quiet through the same chain still leaves me scratching my head.

Just another thought.

If you move away from your workstation does the noise diminish?

Some guitars that are not well shielded  will pick up noise from computers and other electronics.

I would try a more competent tech.
Did he open the wiring cavity  and look inside??
Sometimes a microscopic short - Wires get knarled up - wires hanging on by a thread- cold soldier joints.
Why not open it your self and tell us what you see.

One thing seems for certain - the actual wires, pots, switch etc. of the guitar's electrical circuits aren't going to re-arrange themselves simply because of what it's plugged into. So if a tone control's acting on the "wrong" pickup it's going to be doing that no matter what's on the other end of the cable.

You say the bridge p/u tone control affects the neck pickup - is that when both pickups are selected or when only one is selected?

As for the noise issue, my PC (in fact, all PCs) causes noise problems in any guitar, even my current "go to" SG. In my case, the noise is mostly whine from the disk drives and possibly the psu. Plugged into a Sansamp then interface I have to gate it out with a Boss NS-1 placed after the guitar, it's that obvious. Guitar Rig also needs heavy gating.
 
If the noise is PC related, simply turning round and facing a different way can make a huge difference.

As can using a small amp - plugging the same guitar/fx setup into my recently acquired BlackHeart Killer Ant then micing with an SM57, I've found the noise problem much less evident, and I barely use the NS-1 any more.

So I wonder if the noise problem is down to the amount of amplification/gain being applied by a chain of interface and plugins (all adding gain/compression), plus being near a PC making for a very noisy electrical environment. My limited experimentations with Guitar Rig (limited because I hate it) make me suspect it's inherently very noisy as well.
 
As for any impedance mismatch with a DI box, the most common problem is loss of treble and volume caused by too low an impedance (same problem as the "tone sucking" characteristic of a badly bypassed effect).
 
Putting a decent buffering pre-amp with a high input impedance and low output impedance between guitar and DI will usually correct that problem becaue the guitar sees the high impedance it expects and the DI box sees the lower impedance it expects.

One example of such a preamp is any Boss pedal.