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GMC Forum _ GEAR & PRODUCTION _ Eliminating The Hum From The Coils

Posted by: utak3r Jan 22 2009, 03:52 PM

If you can hear a hum from your coils (you can recognize it by touching the strings - if it goes away, it's from coils) there's an easy solution for you.
Today I was restringing my axe and started to think if I can get rid of this horrible hum....
Well - yes, I succeeded

I opened the electronics, took 0.047 µF capacitor with my isolated pincers (it's very important, they have to be isolated, as your body have a huge influence, you can't touch anything in your guitar while doing this), and tried to connect chassises of the potentiometers. When I connected the main volume with a tone of the bridge coil - the hum has gone!

So I took my soldering gun and soldered this capacitor (joining the chassises of them). While you're there, you can get a review if all the ground wires are on their places and connected to the socket's ground.

It's really easy, don't be afraid - guitar electronics hardly can be named as electronics it's just a few big elements. Go and try!

Posted by: Toni Suominen Jan 22 2009, 09:24 PM

Thanks for the tip dude, I'm sure this will come in handy for a lot of people

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Jan 23 2009, 01:05 AM

THanks for the clarification mate. I always though that when you touch the string, and the noise is gone, that noise is from the grounding problems, never though it is tied to single coils. Singles have the constant hum all the time, no matter if you touch the metal of not. There are several ways to lower down the humming, and one of those are dipping the pups in wax, putting metal foil on the pickguard to prevent interference, and painting the body cavity with non conducting paint/matter.

Posted by: Bogdan Radovic Jan 23 2009, 06:30 PM

Thanks for the tip man!! I always thought the grounding problems were to blame!
This will come handy to a lot of people!

Posted by: Patrik Jezierski Feb 3 2009, 02:57 AM

QUOTE

If you can hear a hum from your coils (you can recognize it by touching the strings - if it goes away, it's from coils) there's an easy solution for you.
Today I was restringing my axe and started to think if I can get rid of this horrible hum....
Well - yes, I succeeded smile.gif

I opened the electronics, took 0.047 µF capacitor with my isolated pincers (it's very important, they have to be isolated, as your body have a huge influence, you can't touch anything in your guitar while doing this), and tried to connect chassises of the potentiometers. When I connected the main volume with a tone of the bridge coil - the hum has gone! biggrin.gif

So I took my soldering gun and soldered this capacitor (joining the chassises of them). While you're there, you can get a review if all the ground wires are on their places and connected to the socket's ground.

It's really easy, don't be afraid - guitar electronics hardly can be named as electronics wink.gif it's just a few big elements. Go and try!

Nice!
I just finished doing some modifications to my pickups cause i noticed that the pickup groundings wasnt "stable" or how to put it. Well it could happen that the sound just disappered for no reason when i used the pickup switcher and instead of a full tone it just played on really low volume. But now to my problem. I managed to fix the problem, but got a new problem instead. It makes a really nasty hum when I use distortion. The thing Is that I didn't do anything with it more than reconnecting the ground wires. It would be really nice if you could post a picture of how you fixed yours.