Single Coils with Distortion NOISE

[HNB]

I am loving my Strat pickup sounds. I know loads of people also use Jazzy's, Jags, and other single coil pickups. What I am struggling with is if I use a single coil pickup with my distortion, overdrive, or fuzz pedal I get a nasty buzz. I know single coils have more noise than humbuckers. I also know if I use two together it reduces the noise.

What I want to know is how can I use my single coil positions with distortion without getting the buzz. (Aside from single coil size humbuckers, noiseless pickups.) Just want to use my nice clean sounding single coil pickups with gain and not get the nasty buzz noise with it.

BTW Yeah the guitars are shielded and I am using a power filter for my amp and pedals. Without distortion the hum is hardly noticeable.

[PaulDesmondTutu]

I have two Ilitch systems and I'm not the only one here on OSG. I really like them but they are expensive.

http://www.ilitchelectronics.com/strat-bpncs-3/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[thisisnickpaige]

It may also be the stock pickups. Could you record a sample of the noise? I use mostly single coils, and there is that 60 cycle hum but not like a terrible sound. How much gain are you using with the pedals?

[HNB]

Green Muff or DS1. Also Robot Devil and Band of Gypsies Fuzz.

[HNB]

I picked up a Boss Noise Supressor at a pawn shop. Would that help it?

[Larry Mal]

I have two Ilitch systems and I'm not the only one here on OSG. I really like them but they are expensive.

http://www.ilitchelectronics.com/strat-bpncs-3/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's what I was going to say. Why deal with it if you don't have to? I have the Ilitch stuff on two Telecasters and will put one on my G&L Legacy at some point.

If you have a Strat, you are in better luck, since you can actually find used/discounted ones for Fender guitars if you look.

[Embenny]

I picked up a Boss Noise Supressor at a pawn shop. Would that help it?

There are two kinds of noise gates. One all-or-none type with a threshold and release, which cut hum when you're not playing but do nothing while playing, and one notch filter type that try to suck out the frequencies at which the hum occur regardless of whether you are playing or not. The second type does affect tone in that frequency range. I believe the Boss pedal is the first of those two.

Place it BEFORE the fuzz to reduce the pickup hum while it's quiet, before being rammed through all those gain stages. Placing it after the fuzz will make it very hard to detect when you've stopped playing.

I stopped caring about hum years ago. Watch any live performance by a band that uses fuzz, and you'll hear bits of fuzz before and after the songs, when they're not playing but haven't killed the volume on the guitars. It's just part of single coil life. I've tried everything - dummy coils, noise suppressors, noiseless pickups. My Kemper profiler has a great hum filter now which helps, but beyond that I don't care anymore. I have one strat with the Illitch backplate and it's amazing, but there are no versions for my JMs, jags or Mustangs. So maybe saying I don't care is inaccurate - I do shield my guitars and I did buy the Illitch, but I accept it in situations where I don't have any further options (I'm not shielding my vintage Jag or mustangs, and I'm not switching all my guitars to humcancelling pickups).

The nice thing about 60 cycle hum is that it's negligible while you're playing.

[HNB]

I will do a sound demo tomorrow.

[PaulDesmondTutu]

I picked up a Boss Noise Supressor at a pawn shop. Would that help it?

There are two kinds of noise gates. One all-or-none type with a threshold and release, which cut hum when you're not playing but do nothing while playing, and one notch filter type that try to suck out the frequencies at which the hum occur regardless of whether you are playing or not. The second type does affect tone in that frequency range. I believe the Boss pedal is the first of those two.

Place it BEFORE the fuzz to reduce the pickup hum while it's quiet, before being rammed through all those gain stages. Placing it after the fuzz will make it very hard to detect when you've stopped playing.

I stopped caring about hum years ago. Watch any live performance by a band that uses fuzz, and you'll hear bits of fuzz before and after the songs, when they're not playing but haven't killed the volume on the guitars. It's just part of single coil life. I've tried everything - dummy coils, noise suppressors, noiseless pickups. My Kemper profiler has a great hum filter now which helps, but beyond that I don't care anymore. I have one strat with the Illitch backplate and it's amazing, but there are no versions for my JMs, jags or Mustangs. So maybe saying I don't care is inaccurate - I do shield my guitars and I did buy the Illitch, but I accept it in situations where I don't have any further options (I'm not shielding my vintage Jag or mustangs, and I'm not switching all my guitars to humcancelling pickups).

The nice thing about 60 cycle hum is that it's negligible while you're playing.

One Ilitch system I have is in my Jazzmaster:

http://www.ilitchelectronics.com/lcncs/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

You do need to have a word with the man himself about the proportions etc. though to make sure it fits.

[Larry Mal]

The best way to deal with noise is to not have it in the first place- that's one of the things they taught me in my audio engineering school, anyway.

No matter what noise treatment you use, it will have negative drawbacks that will in a lot of cases be worse than simply living with the noise, frankly.

So, your guitar is only one part of the equation, right? And the solution might not be there anyway.

Your pedals are part of this, correct? And most pedals are loaded with cheap and noise electronics. It may be that you need to replace them with something else, or shield them.

Does your amp need a tune up?

Your environment is yet another factor, it's very likely that you have dirty power, and if you shield some of your electronics (your amp and pedals) from other electronics (fluorescent lights are a good example) you'll be able to stop them from picking up the noise in your power lines. Look into a Furman line conditioner or similar product for this.

Of course, your guitar can be shielded a lot better more than likely, so get some good electronics in there if you have cheap stuff, and put full shielding in there. I try to hunt down aluminum pickguards when I can, and use the Ilitch noise system when I can, also. Those both cost a lot, but full copper shielding, new caps and pots don't, though.

I tend to hate noise gates, they don't actually prevent any noise exempt when you aren't playing and who the hell cares about that? It might as well prevent noise when you have the guitar in a case in the closet.

So, you'll hear people say that noise doesn't matter when you are playing and shit, I always dismiss that. For one, it might genuinely not matter in your opinion when you are playing in your buddy's basement or at a noisy club, but is that correct? Having a bunch of noise in everyone's amp and in the PA can very much lead to a loss of dynamics on the part of your band as well as listening fatigue on part of the listener. We've all experienced that, a bad sounding amateur rock and roll band in a bad sounding club can be hard to listen to, and cranking up the volume is the usual "solution" employed by these amateurs, but it's exhausting and uninspiring.

Secondly, when you are recording, every single imperfection that you have learned to live with and hope your audience is tolerating is cruelly revealed by your microphones, which will expose every weakness you have in both sound and playing.

I take noise pretty seriously. And again, the best way to deal with noise is to prevent it from happening in the first place, so where is it coming from? Stop it before it happens, don't deal with it afterward, you can't.

[Embenny]

^^ while I agree with most of Larry's points (like eliminating noise sources as the only true control), I only believe in pursuing that to a point. From Hendrix to J Mascis, some of the most influential electric guitar performances and recordings have been made running single coils into fuzzfaces, big muffs, and cranked amps.

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Chaining three distortion pedals and playing djent on a strat bridge pickup is gonna result in a whole lot of un-musical noise smack dab in the middle of the rhythm guitar part. But hearing some 60 cycle hum in the one second between when J Mascis turns on his pedals and when he starts playing (a regular occurrence at Dino Jr. shows) has never decreased my enjoyment of them.

I love the tone of single coils and have wasted a lot of money on noiseless designs that couldn't give me the tone I was looking for. I shield my newer guitars, I use a relatively quiet signal chain (relative to the amount of gain I use, that is), and I do own some guitars with humcanceling pickups, but I'm also not afraid to put my vintage Jag through a bunch of fuzz if it works for me musically.

[Larry Mal]

Well, noise as aesthetic choice is something that I'm not touching on, since I have no idea what kind of music anyone is making and so on. I was just speaking to the idea that unwanted noise was a problem and how to address it.

And sure, Jimi Hendrix was noisy and all that, he was also limited by the technology of the day as we all are, and his live performances are pretty crude in a lot of cases. I've seen some clips where it was only the vocals going through the PA, for instance, with the drums competing with the guitar and amps that were just set on stage, you know? The state of electrified live performance in the 60's was fucking dreadful, nothing to emulate.

When he was in the studio, though, he was absolutely concerned with his music sounding good, and his albums correspondingly sound fucking great, even now. He may have tolerated bad sound live because everyone else had to also, but in the studio he was a perfectionist and his music sounds clear and clean as a result.

You might say that he didn't use bullshit like an Ilitch noise cancelling pick guard, but then again, he dealt with a lot less electrical interference since there was a fraction of electrical devices in his day compared to now, and he also had guitars that were arguably better shielded and recorded in good isolation. He had amp technicians at his disposal and had guitar effects hand built for him. The technicians Jimi Hendrix worked with did a lot to give him a very good signal to noise ratio, and it shows in the recordings that still sound excellent to this day.

I'm not saying anybody is wrong about anything, and if you tolerate or even want a noisy signal for whatever reason, then by all means, you know? But I've always pretty much rejected it as somehow adding an artistic quality to it. History seems to show me that musicians tolerate it only when they have no choice due to budget, and once there is an operating budget that can lead to clean sounding recordings and performance they'll tend to do that.

It's worth bearing in mind that we are discussing the electric guitar, which is an inherently noisy instrument compared to most. I mean, can you imagine a recording of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain with a bunch of 60 cycle hum grinding away all over the performance? It would sound terrible and distracting.

[Embenny]

I totally get where you're coming from, Larry. And I agree that it's all context-specific. I'm originally a classical guitarist by training, where dynamics are so essential that it's one of the few genres whose listeners refuse to accept compressed audio in recordings. A hum in the background of a pianissimo passage would genuinely be experience-ruining. So I guess I'm being a hypocrite here! Especially since I own an illitch-equipped guitar and a Jazzmaster with a hidden dummy coil, among others.

I guess when I think of OSG I think of players who are largely into indie/alt/shoegaze/surf/the genres we typically tie to these guitars. None of those genres are ones where I have typically battled hum in a track-ruining way. When I used to play a lot of blues, the amount of space in the mix around the guitar, coupled with the dynamics of the solos, meant that a "naked" overdriven strat could sometimes have hum pop up in a totally undesirable way. I don't typically encounter that type of soundscape in the genres I play more these days, which is probably why I've stopped being as uptight about it.

[Larry Mal]

Yeah, I'm not always as uptight about it as at other times, still, I always give at least some thought to signal to noise ratio since I was trained as an audio technician and so on. The artist isn't really all that concerned with noise, necessarily, but the engineers have to be at least, and that's why Dinosaur Jr albums sound very good also.

But yeah, like you say, if you want to express the entire dynamics of your instrument, whatever it is, then you need a noise free environment to do so. If you have a microphone in which the noise obscures the most quiet 10% of the notes you are playing, then your microphone is fucking awful and you'd never use it.

I have no idea why guitar players tolerate noise other than like I say, the electric guitar is inherently extremely noisy compared to most instruments and I guess that guitar players have grown accustomed to it, and in the cases that you mention, turned what could be a defect into an artistic strength.

[thisisnickpaige]

I will do a sound demo tomorrow.

Perfect. =]

I’m no Hendrix but my single coils sound awesome through distortion, and fuzz.