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There is nothing more frustrating than bad noises coming out of your amp, and what makes it worse is that sometimes it’s difficult to track down where the noise is actually coming from. On this tip today we’re going to take a look at static buildup, what it sounds like, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it.
There can be many different culprits for popping and crackling in an electric guitar setup. Let’s narrow it down a bit first.
Player Tips: Cleaning Your Guitar Electronics
The voltages in a guitar are very small, so these small discharges relatively make a large impact. This is obviously heard loud and clear through the amp and will drive any reasonable person crazy faster than you can screw up the intro to Sweet Child O’ Mine.
Is your house carpeted? Are you playing guitar in your socks? Do you drag your feet? Is it dry where you are? Is it winter? Do you burn firewood? Do you have a strict no touching policy in your house because of the Thor strength zaps that arc from person to person? If the answer is yes to any of these, then it’s no surprise that you’re having static issues with your electric guitar. Typically static issues occur as the relative humidity goes down. So in the dry parts of summer and winter, this will most likely rear its ugly head.
Good quality shielding helps this problem considerably, and most higher end guitars will have this already installed. While most guitars have some metal shielded tape applied to the back of the pickguard, some will have the full cavity lined with metal shielding that grounds out any static electricity before it can interrupt the delicate signal.
Crackling And Popping And The Gm 36 Cut Out
Sometimes though, in the driest conditions you’ll still have some static pops. This is pretty normal, so don’t go yell at your guitar tech until you’ve tried this solve. Take a dryer sheet and rub the pickguard down evenly and thoroughly. Make sure to get around all of the pots, switches, and input jack. This should help tremendously. You will have to do this every once in awhile, but most of the time this picks up the remaining static in that plastic pickguard.
If you’re still having issues, pull the pickguard off and stuff a dryer sheet into the cavity. I have used this technique many times and it has always worked for me. I’m just not sure if having your guitar remind me that I should be doing laundry is the better of the two options.
If the dryer sheet trick didn’t stop the popping and crackling in your guitar, you’re most likely looking at a different issue. The first thing that I’d check is all the grounding in the guitar. If ground wires can break at solder points, and old solder, or poorly soldered connections will cause all sorts of excess noise. Pots that are low quality or starting to go bad can also cause grounding issues. Sometimes pots will get dirty and needs to just be cleaned out with an electronics cleaner. Depending on how much you want to put into a guitar, make sure that the components are of good quality and installed correctly by a competent tech. Given good pickups, components, grounding, and shielding, you should have a guitar that is quiet from crackling and popping.
My Guitar Is Making My Amp Produce A Static Sound. What Should I Do?
Cleaning the pots with some good electronics cleaner. Shoot the cleaner into the pot and then turn the pot back and forth a handful of time.Above: A properly screened Strat-type guitar. To make a significant difference, the whole surface area of the pickup and wiring cavities must be covered and connected to the earth side of the circuit. There must be electrical continuity throughout, and in this example, every join in the copper foil is bridged with solder.
Electrical noise — hiss, buzz and hum — is something that plagues every electric guitarist to some degree, but noise comes in a variety of forms and it is important to establish exactly which kind(s) you are experiencing in order to devise an appropriate solution. Most noise in an electric guitar rig emanates from one or more of five different sources: amplifier self-generated hum and/or hiss; hum or buzz picked up by the guitar itself; self-generated noise from any pedals/processors in the circuit; gain structure-related noise, such as cascaded distortion stages; and ground-loop-related hum. If you think you are suffering from noise that isn't generated in one of these ways, I'd like to hear about it!
The most efficient way to track down noise in a guitar system is to think of the amplifier or studio monitor system as the end of your signal chain and work systematically back from there. If you don't do this, you have no idea whether the noise you are hearing from the amplifier is being generated within the amp itself, or being picked up by the guitar and fed to the amp. You could end up taking steps to solve a problem you don't have, as well as completely failing to solve the one you actually do have. If your amp or monitoring system hums or buzzes excessively with no input connected to it, then you've got an equipment malfunction. That is beyond the scope of this article, so for these purposes I'll assume that that part of your rig is clean. From here on, I'm also going to treat amps and recording processors (Line 6 Pods and the like) as the same, because it is the 'upstream' noise of the guitar itself and related systems that we are interested in.
Tone Tips: Keep It Quiet, Part 2
Left: A small tag of copper foil is used to continue the screening onto the underside of the shielded scratchplate. Passing one of the scratchplate screws through it ensures consistent contact.
When tracking down noise it always pays to initially reduce your system to the minimum number of components, so begin by connecting your guitar directly to a single amp or recording processor via a screened cable, set the volume of the amp or monitor system to a normal operating level, turn the guitar's volume control all the way down and just listen. If there is any more noise than there was before the guitar was connected then the cable is at fault. With nothing connected, the amp's input jack will be automatically short-circuited to ground; with the guitar connected, but turned down, the input is again shorted, but at the other end of the cable, so the cable is the only variable.
Assuming all is well with the cable, now turn up the guitar's volume to maximum, hold the strings in a normal playing fashion and listen again. If you hear no more noise than before, congratulations; you must have a fantastically well-screened guitar and the perfect guitar-recording environment. The rest of us will be hearing at least a bit of buzzing and maybe a bit of 50/60Hz hum as well. Move the guitar around over an area of a few feet either way to see if the hum goes away. The level of hum is usually directly related to the guitar's proximity to any large mains transformers in the room. If you are using conventional (non-hum-cancelling) single-coil pickups and you are within the radiated field of a mains transformer, you will get hum. Exactly how much depends on the gain in your system and your proximity to the source. If you can't work out the origin of the hum field, try switching off everything except your amp (or monitor system, if you are DI'd) and then switch things back on one at a time to see when the hum reappears. When it does, see if you can re-site the offending item further away. The only solution is physical separation, as the amount of additional screening required to keep induced hum out of the pickups would actually prevent the guitar working at all. Of course, if you are using humbucking pickups, you are in the clear on this one, but the chances are you'll still have some 'buzz'.
Guitar Rig 5, Preset Help Needed
Buzz has a lot more high-frequency content than hum. If you are unsure which you have, try turning your guitar's tone control all the way down; if the noise mostly goes away, you are dealing with buzz rather than hum. Buzz will also often be greatly reduced when you touch the strings or any other metal part of the guitar, sometimes accompanied by an audible click, whereas hum will remain unchanged. The common explanation for why noise goes away when you touch the strings or metalwork is that you are adding to the overall amount of screening. I'm not so sure about that, because certain types of noise actually get louder when you hold a guitar close to your body without touching the strings. This suggests to me that the player's body is, effectively, conducting the interference into close proximity with the guitar. The noise goes away when you touch
Cleaning the pots with some good electronics cleaner. Shoot the cleaner into the pot and then turn the pot back and forth a handful of time.Above: A properly screened Strat-type guitar. To make a significant difference, the whole surface area of the pickup and wiring cavities must be covered and connected to the earth side of the circuit. There must be electrical continuity throughout, and in this example, every join in the copper foil is bridged with solder.
Electrical noise — hiss, buzz and hum — is something that plagues every electric guitarist to some degree, but noise comes in a variety of forms and it is important to establish exactly which kind(s) you are experiencing in order to devise an appropriate solution. Most noise in an electric guitar rig emanates from one or more of five different sources: amplifier self-generated hum and/or hiss; hum or buzz picked up by the guitar itself; self-generated noise from any pedals/processors in the circuit; gain structure-related noise, such as cascaded distortion stages; and ground-loop-related hum. If you think you are suffering from noise that isn't generated in one of these ways, I'd like to hear about it!
The most efficient way to track down noise in a guitar system is to think of the amplifier or studio monitor system as the end of your signal chain and work systematically back from there. If you don't do this, you have no idea whether the noise you are hearing from the amplifier is being generated within the amp itself, or being picked up by the guitar and fed to the amp. You could end up taking steps to solve a problem you don't have, as well as completely failing to solve the one you actually do have. If your amp or monitoring system hums or buzzes excessively with no input connected to it, then you've got an equipment malfunction. That is beyond the scope of this article, so for these purposes I'll assume that that part of your rig is clean. From here on, I'm also going to treat amps and recording processors (Line 6 Pods and the like) as the same, because it is the 'upstream' noise of the guitar itself and related systems that we are interested in.
Tone Tips: Keep It Quiet, Part 2
Left: A small tag of copper foil is used to continue the screening onto the underside of the shielded scratchplate. Passing one of the scratchplate screws through it ensures consistent contact.
When tracking down noise it always pays to initially reduce your system to the minimum number of components, so begin by connecting your guitar directly to a single amp or recording processor via a screened cable, set the volume of the amp or monitor system to a normal operating level, turn the guitar's volume control all the way down and just listen. If there is any more noise than there was before the guitar was connected then the cable is at fault. With nothing connected, the amp's input jack will be automatically short-circuited to ground; with the guitar connected, but turned down, the input is again shorted, but at the other end of the cable, so the cable is the only variable.
Assuming all is well with the cable, now turn up the guitar's volume to maximum, hold the strings in a normal playing fashion and listen again. If you hear no more noise than before, congratulations; you must have a fantastically well-screened guitar and the perfect guitar-recording environment. The rest of us will be hearing at least a bit of buzzing and maybe a bit of 50/60Hz hum as well. Move the guitar around over an area of a few feet either way to see if the hum goes away. The level of hum is usually directly related to the guitar's proximity to any large mains transformers in the room. If you are using conventional (non-hum-cancelling) single-coil pickups and you are within the radiated field of a mains transformer, you will get hum. Exactly how much depends on the gain in your system and your proximity to the source. If you can't work out the origin of the hum field, try switching off everything except your amp (or monitor system, if you are DI'd) and then switch things back on one at a time to see when the hum reappears. When it does, see if you can re-site the offending item further away. The only solution is physical separation, as the amount of additional screening required to keep induced hum out of the pickups would actually prevent the guitar working at all. Of course, if you are using humbucking pickups, you are in the clear on this one, but the chances are you'll still have some 'buzz'.
Guitar Rig 5, Preset Help Needed
Buzz has a lot more high-frequency content than hum. If you are unsure which you have, try turning your guitar's tone control all the way down; if the noise mostly goes away, you are dealing with buzz rather than hum. Buzz will also often be greatly reduced when you touch the strings or any other metal part of the guitar, sometimes accompanied by an audible click, whereas hum will remain unchanged. The common explanation for why noise goes away when you touch the strings or metalwork is that you are adding to the overall amount of screening. I'm not so sure about that, because certain types of noise actually get louder when you hold a guitar close to your body without touching the strings. This suggests to me that the player's body is, effectively, conducting the interference into close proximity with the guitar. The noise goes away when you touch
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