Noisy Single Coils, Unexpectedly...

[renzen]

I'm having confusion about a wood-mount, rear electronic route strat.

I just put Bareknuckle 'Irish Tour' pickups (RWRP on mid) into a pickguard mount strat recently, and had no noise at all, clean, dirty, higher volume, etc. Was so leased that it seemed the right thing to do to put together another, using rear routed electronics... but no.

Wood mounted (with the tubing & foam) looks OK, and sounds fine on clean settings, up to reasonably loud volumes on tube amps. Bust when overdriven, there's plenty o' noise, like the worst s.c. p/ups and wiring I've heard/seen. And, despite continuity checks OK everywhere it should be grounded, there is a slight 'tick' sound on touching a grounded part (which again seems like the bad p/up thing, but these haven't been bad p/ups on the pickguard guitar at all -- they're great, in fact).

Tearing out hair seems less than helpful...

Has anybody had a similar experience, or have ideas about why this should be happening with an otherwise pretty decent build?

Thanks!

 

[swarfrat]

Whenever things start to act really weird, check your grounds. Relativism doesn't work real well in the world of high impedance signals.

 

[Cagey]

Your first situation is the unusual one, not the second. Single coils are always noisy. It's in their nature. They're essentially big antennas, and even very aggressive shielding generally has only a limited effect. If you're sure your wiring is good, I would wonder if something has changed in the environment. New computer, new fluorescent lamps - like replacing incandescents with those little coily rascals - new special effects box, higher gain amplifier... things of that nature that emit a lot of RFI/EMI that are present now that weren't before, or are more willing to amplify it.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Most single coils aren't that noisy, though. Several times I've had really bad hum and put it down to "well that's just single coils", only to later discover I had a faulty pedal power supply, or intermittent ground connection, or whatever. There is still an amount of noise that is too much, even for singles coils.

Check each individual pickup by wiring each straight to the jack in turn. If the problem goes away, gradually reintroduce the other components.

 

[Patrick from Davis]

An easy mistake is to swap the signal and ground at the output jack on the guitar.  Nothing unusual about that, it happens all the time, and sounds noisy.
Patrick

 

[renzen]

Sincerely, Thank You All. 

You've already given me a whole new set of things to check out.

I do think that the grounding is likely at least part of the problem, but I can't seem to find a bad solder joint. I guess I would have to check for a poor path to ground, with higher impedance than should be there. I did wire this to eliminate ground loops, but maybe there's still a circuit with differing impedance, inadvertently. That's going to take some time, but will definitely be worthwhile if I can find something.

I don't think there are any changes in RFI or EMI in my practice room, but even if there were, they ought to affect both Bareknuckle guitars about the same (?) The kicker is that I keep checking the wood mounted p/u guitar against the pickguard strat build, and the standard build still has almost no noise, even at ear-bleeder volumes (not making the neighbors very happy -- it's good to keep silicon wafer earplugs around for things like this...).

I will try wiring each pickup directly, and see if there's a problem with the pickup or the wiring, or something else about each one. That makes sense too, isolating and testing each one for problems. And will check that ground again to be certain it's properly soldered.

I'll try as many of these things as possible tomorrow, see what shows up, and post whatever I find. Thanks!

 

[renzen]

Hi All,

No excuses, but this took some time, and no major fidnings on seeking an electronic problem with this, although there was some improvement. The thing was, I began to notice (gah -- was it there before??) some hum in the standard pickguard mounted Bareknuckles, and the more I listened, the more I noticed it, even though it wasn't bad.  And after rewiring everything on the new guitar, the difference between the older strat build and the newer was pretty much gone. I thought that there must have been some cold solder joints, and the use of foil insulated wires seems to have made a difference as well.

So, I apologize -- I didn't report this accurately in the first instance.

In any case (no pun intended), as I worked out the kinks in the new guitar, it seemed that s.c. p/ups were just not right for this guitar, and decided to go with hum cancelling p/ups... Had white p/ups, now going w/ black; had single coil, now going with hum canceling, hotter ones. But this seems like a better overall match, for play and for aesthetic appeal.

I have S.D. a black hot rail on order for the bridge, and black cool rails scheduled for mid and neck. And I decided to go with pickup ring mounts for convenience.  (As a cool thing, the p/up mounts have an overlap in the center for the p/up, and the screw heads for height adjustment normally overlap about 1.5 mm, with round s.c. p/ups, but with rails, there's that indentation thing with the two coils on either side, so no overlap, which is nice.

The s.c. pickups should go well in a pickguard strat build later this month...

Thank You for all your help -- your ideas and feedback were all good places to look, and were useful -- and looking at the project from a different perspective, it made sense to do a different thing, overall.