Guitar Buzz.... Impossible to fix?1?!

Everyone,

Hey everyone. I must first say that I am not an electric guitar player, so let me know if I am fighting the impossible.

I have always had an annoying buzz in my electric guitars which is not that annoying until you add compression and everything on the guitar, especially the bass. The buzzing only seems to happen when I turn up the tone knob or any knob that brings up the higher frequencies. When I am touching the strings, the buzz almost goes completely away. If I tilt the guitars in weird unplayable directions, I can get the buzz to go completely away, but this only works if I would play the guitar upside down at a 30 degree angle.

All of my equipment is plugged into UPS's that have power conditioning and report that I have a good ground. My studio is in an older house and I was just thinking that it was possibly a bad grounding issue. However, today I wired in a solid ground and nothing changed.

I am currently plugging the guitars in directly to a Vintech 473 preamp which then plugs in direct to my Tascam DM3200 where I am hearing the buzz. However, I get the same issue whether it is plugged into my ADL 600 (then into my DM3200) or plugged directly into the Tascam DM3200.

I have both a Fender Squier Stratocaster Made in Japan and a Fender Jazz Bass Made in Mexico that I have been testing this issue with, but everybody who comes and records has the same issue.

I read the post from a few weeks ago about guitar buzzing and other appliances in the house. I turned off everything in the house and the buzzing still persists as always. I also want to mention that not a single microphone of mine condenser or dynamic have had buzzing issues unless I really crank the gain on them.

The only other thing that I can possibly think of is the fact that we have power lines that run long the back property line of our house. The studio is towards the very front of the house, but perhaps this is what is causing the problem. If this is causing the problem, then I am going to go buy a chainsaw and move the power line poles a street over from our house. But hopefully it won't come down to that. :-)

The other thing to keep in mind here is that single coil, non-humbucking pick-ups hum. If you have wireless keyboards and mice, this will also increase the humming sound. Here's a reasonably good explanation of this phenomenon.

This is a common problem with single pole guitar pickups - they don't have the built-in noise cancellation of humbuckers.

Possible solutions:
Replace the pickups - there are a number of dual-coil strat pickups available that you can just drop in (Ok maybe a little soldering).

Shield the interior electronics - line the interior elections cavity with copper tape. Not too sure on the specifics of this i.e. how to ground the shielding. but I've heard it helps. In one of the recent Guitar Player mags (December or Jan) the one with Queen's Brian May on the cover - they mention that as part of his guitar rebuild they lined the cavities with copper tape.

If it is an abnormal hum, however, it can be hardware related.

Not only did my first recording sessions in the original Cakewalk (when their DAW was called Cakewalk) turn out to be taxing with abnormal hum, but I noticed it again when I built another computer and found out that the particular power supply I was using wasn't grounded well enough. Caused the same symptoms as the CRT monitor.

I was, in my first response assuming that the hum you are talking about is an abnormally loud hum.

Wow! A lot of great help here from the forum. I really appreciate this.

I run dual LCD monitors, but just for the heck of it, I did experiment with turning them off. I also unplugged my modems, clock and everything that I could think of that could interfere. I turned off all of the lights in the house and the television. I have a clean pathway from the preamp to the guitars using a Monster Cable.

No luck?

Thanks newfuturevintage and The Steven fo the information about the pickups. I definitely think those things will help. I'll be first to admit that the guitars I have aren't 1st class guitars and they are kind of old. I am mainly concerned about others that come in and record guitar parts. They have seemed to have the same problems with buzz, but their guitars could have PU's that have the same problems and aren't the best for reducing noise.

No luck?

Sorry, didn't give results... Yeah, no luck. Exactly the same as before.

However the best way for audio is to have the first gang going to a plug socket then have another gang pluged into that and then another I.e daisy chain them. This will massively reduce hum.

You are right. I have heard that before. I have two UPS's plugged into the same wall outlet. Everything is eventually plugged into those in some way or another.

Ideas:

1) Turn up the gain until the noise becomes the sound of your guitar. People make millions of dollars on this one.

2) Record the noise alone and run a frequency analysis. If it's all at 60Hz, it's your guitar pickups and/or possibly (not likely considering your description) home appliances. If it's elsewhere in the frequency ranges, it could be RF or bad wires or just about anything. In any case there are plugins out there that can take samples of noise and essentially create a frequency filter to EQ them down in your mix. You'll lose some fidelity of course, but play with the wet/dry until you've reached a good compromise. I believe I'm thinking of Waves Z-Noise here, not sure, I only used it once on a 14-day trial but thought it worked fairly well.

3) Everyone is always very suprised by how noisy single coil guitars are when they record them. Playing live it's not an issue, and likely by the end of the mixing process it won't be an issue, but when you hear it alone it can be shocking. Since you say "buzz", and not "earpiercing intolerable shriek" I assume this is the case for you, and I say don't stress out about it too much until you've recorded everything and are done mixing, then if it's a problem (not likely) you can come back to the pain in the butt methods to try to get around it.

ORIGINAL: newfuturevintage

ORIGINAL: Dizzi45Z

Thanks newfuturevintage and The Steven fo the information about the pickups. I definitely think those things will help. I'll be first to admit that the guitars I have aren't 1st class guitars and they are kind of old. I am mainly concerned about others that come in and record guitar parts. They have seemed to have the same problems with buzz, but their guitars could have PU's that have the same problems and aren't the best for reducing noise.

More than anything else that's been mentioned here (*given you're not using CRTs and don't have dimmer switches half-cocked), the PU replacement will help. I've been in the process of swapping out single coils for humbuckers & stacked noise cancelling PUs in some of my guitars and basses over the past few months and it's been totally worth it. Next thing that helped was to shield the instruments. Those two things, in that order, got my buzz issue to a very quiet place.

In your shoes, I'd get my instruments as immune to buzz as possible so when clients come in with less than stellar instruments, you've got a buzz-free alternative to offer them.

Excellent idea. I think you are right on. The buzzing isn't as bad as I might make it sound. It just really becomes obvious when compression is added and if I enhance the higher frequencies. I also think your advice to at least have an instrument that isn't buzzing for the clients is a great idea and a way to show that it isn't the equipment, but the instrument that is the problem. I have a friend coming over tonight with a nice Fender American Strat with humbuckers on it for us to test out.

I really like the Jazz Bass and I think new pick-ups would be the solution there. I wonder if custom pick ups would be a good idea for a Fender Squier. I wonder if it wouldn't just be better (maybe even cheaper) to just get a different electric guitar with humbucker pickups. What do you think? Also, where do you all recommend that I buy as far as brands of pick-ups and where?

I can't help you with your problem, there are far more qualified cake bakers here than me, but I do have a workaround for you

Get yoursef a ground strap from a coomputer store, you wear it on your wrist. Find a good spot to clip it to your guitar so you are "touching" it...you said that makes it go away...so just ground yourself to the guitar...I have done this trick myself in the past, and for th time being, was my best workaround.

Here is a very useful link on the process that hasn't yet been mentioned:
http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/shielding/shield3.php

Here is a good source for copper shielding tape:
http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_pickups/Supplies:_Shielding.html

Great links! Thanks!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/08/BUG1J9N3C61.DTL&type=business

I know you want it out while you play, but you can get rid of just about any noise without degrading signal with Adobe Audition. You can sample and remove anything( I've removed crowd noise effectively) from a track as long as you have a place you can sample only the desired noise. This is of course an 'after' solution, just wanted to give you the opportunity to consider it. Take care, Shep

ORIGINAL: Dizzi45Z

Everyone,

Hey everyone. I must first say that I am not an electric guitar player, so let me know if I am fighting the impossible.

I have always had an annoying buzz in my electric guitars which is not that annoying until you add compression and everything on the guitar, especially the bass. The buzzing only seems to happen when I turn up the tone knob or any knob that brings up the higher frequencies. When I am touching the strings, the buzz almost goes completely away. If I tilt the guitars in weird unplayable directions, I can get the buzz to go completely away, but this only works if I would play the guitar upside down at a 30 degree angle.

All of my equipment is plugged into UPS's that have power conditioning and report that I have a good ground. My studio is in an older house and I was just thinking that it was possibly a bad grounding issue. However, today I wired in a solid ground and nothing changed.

I am currently plugging the guitars in directly to a Vintech 473 preamp which then plugs in direct to my Tascam DM3200 where I am hearing the buzz. However, I get the same issue whether it is plugged into my ADL 600 (then into my DM3200) or plugged directly into the Tascam DM3200.

I have both a Fender Squier Stratocaster Made in Japan and a Fender Jazz Bass Made in Mexico that I have been testing this issue with, but everybody who comes and records has the same issue.

I read the post from a few weeks ago about guitar buzzing and other appliances in the house. I turned off everything in the house and the buzzing still persists as always. I also want to mention that not a single microphone of mine condenser or dynamic have had buzzing issues unless I really crank the gain on them.

The only other thing that I can possibly think of is the fact that we have power lines that run long the back property line of our house. The studio is towards the very front of the house, but perhaps this is what is causing the problem. If this is causing the problem, then I am going to go buy a chainsaw and move the power line poles a street over from our house. But hopefully it won't come down to that. :-)

Dizzi45z,

I agree with many of the posts here. Shielding your guitar and properly grounding it are big considerations. Not having a CRT on during recording is a must. Keep all power cords away from wall-wart transformers. Turn off all flourescent lighting. Get rid of any cheap lighting dimmers.

There is no need to go to humbucking pickups; Single coils will work just fine if you are careful about grounding/shielding/transformer noise, and all other electrical considerations are dealt with appropriately.

If you absolutely can't get results in this way, you might want to try some different single coil pickups in your guitar. I've got a Strat Plus with Lace Sensor pickups in it that works really well in most electronically noisy environments. The only thing that the Lace pickups won't handle (in my case) is a CRT. Got to turn off my CRT's, even when I'm using the Lace pickups.

If you still can't get pretty clean results after trying all of the above, you may be living in an area where there is a strong radio transmitter nearby. I went through this for years and it's very frustrating. Also, you may be on to something with your statement about power lines running right behind your house. And, no matter what you do, if you're compressing the signal fairly significantly, it's obviously going to bring up any low-level hum/buzz in the track.

You say your studio is in a older home. Improper and/or non-existant grounding could be your problem. Even though you've "wired in a solid ground", are you positive that it is done properly? There's a lot of stuff that I've read about this subject and, though I'm absolutely *not* an expert, it seems that there's a lot to know about properly grounding a facility. Forgive me if you are an electrician or someone who is an expert in electricty---no offense intended. I'm just passing on a bit of what I've read about this issue over the years.

Best of luck in solving your buzzing issue. This is a tricky and complex problem if the simple stuff doesn't work..... I'd be interested to hear how you solve this, when you do.

Best regards,
Bill