I'm wearing my Swatch watch on my right wrist.
When I record my single coil Stratocaster I hear an audible tic tac tic tac tic tac.
So I have to lift myself off the clock.

TH3 has a very nice gate that will cut out hum quite well.  A real amp is much more difficult to control than TH3.  Set the gate so that it's quiet between notes but will stay open during sustained notes.  Thedoccal's advice is good, too, and you may prefer to use both gates.  Hope this helps.

yellowcake64
I like it but the high gain patches are REALLY noisy; actually excessively so. I’m relatively inexperienced with amp sims, but apart from the obvious (shoving a gate in), have any of you had similar problems and managed to improve things?

Since you say you are relatively inexperienced with amp sims - once you get the excessive noise problem fixed, high gain settings often require removing some high freq bands. Take an eq with a notch (high q) attenuating a narrow band and sweep between 1k and 10k. Once you find a problem you can play with the q and level. It's not unusual to need to remove a couple bands. If you use quad curve try the hybrid setting.

A low pass filter with a cutoff between 4 to 5k (you can experiment) often can tame unwanted frequencies, too.

To reduce noise from a guitar,
- when guitar has only one volume nob, turn it to eleven and leave it there.
- when a guitar has 2 volume nobs, adjust so at least one of the two is on eleven and the other adjusted relatively for tone.

I swear amp sims make this buzz worse though. My Telecaster buzzes far more loudly when plugged into an amp sim than it does plugged into a real amp with similar settings, even with my guitar in exactly the same position. I just presumed it was one of these stupid attempts by developers to make plugins sound more "real" by adding noise, and that they add too much. I cannot use higher gain amp sim presets unless I rotate my guitar into just the right position, which annoyingly enough happens to be facing away from my DAW with the body tilted down to the floor about 30 degrees. I literally have to play like that lol. 

Could that be a result of your guitar being closer to the computer when you are using a sim Sharke. Have you tried moving around when the sim is being noisy

Its not always guitars in particular, though I know what 60 cycle hum sounds like coming from a strat.
Most of my good starts I modded with grounding shield (copper paint/copper tape).
More often than not its the Amp sim itself and its only using high gain amps and/or associated with gain pedals in general.
When im using high gain Amp sim models I always use a gate. most have them built in to the amp sim for this reason alone.

Kamikaze
Could that be a result of your guitar being closer to the computer when you are using a sim Sharke. Have you tried moving around when the sim is being noisy

I find the same as Sharke. And my stool is in the same place whether I'm using an amp and pedals or going direct into the computer.

I suspect much of the sim noise is the result of the sims, and even more the manufacturer's presets, generally being programmed to produce a lot of distortion in the hope that will sound more "awesome" when not in the context of a mix. I've come across people on forums who have only used sims then finally got a real JCM or Mesa who complain their amp is broken because it doesn't have the "killer distortion" of the emulator's version of that amp.

Double post courtesy of the laggy forum software, ignore.