grounded?
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:32 pm
Hi all,
I hope it’s OK that I am posting this here instead of in the electronics section. Just seems like this is more a beginner issue with electronics than a real electronics post might be. But anyway…
I am having a lot of issues with buzz and have been pretty thorough with trouble shooting and reducing the cause to one of two things:
1) my pup is a lemon, or 2) for reasons I don’t understand my ground wire is not making proper connection with the bridge.
I have played guitar for years and am familiar with noisy single coil pickups, but unless I am really mistaken, the buzz I am getting is not a matter of shielding (which I did). This is the first time I have done something like this so it’s not impossible that the issue is with my soldering joints, but I have been pretty methodical with soldering and stuck as best I can to what I understand to be standard best practices (no blowing on joints, pre tinning, cleaning the tip, pre tin again, and so on). Assuming I am correct about this, I went on with eliminating other possible causes by shortening the path bit by bit until I had the pickup going straight to the jack. When I was still getting a lot of noise at this point, just for curiosity sake, I decided to remove the ground wire to the bridge just to see if the noise changed in anyway and lo and behold, it did not. Thus I have come to think it is one of the two above stated issues.
My question is this, based on the picture here, can anyone think of why my ground wire would not be making sufficient contact with the bridge (not pictured, but when everything is assembled, the bridge sits right on top of the wire that I soldered to a small strip of copper foil) ?
The pickup is one of those Gretsch Electro Lap Steel Pickups that I got via Amazon for about $25.00. I don’t have another pickup to test out at the moment so can’t confirm there is any issue with this one, and before I go out and buy another one I want to be as sure as I can the fault lies here. On a somewhat different note though, Other than the buzz, the pickup actually has a nice warm tone, albeit lacking a little in the gain department when I want something nastier, but of course a simple stomp box would solve this issue.
So all that said, I would love to know what people think about this problem. I have never done any of this type of work before so am really unsure what else there is to try to locate the source of this problem.
Thanks!
I hope it’s OK that I am posting this here instead of in the electronics section. Just seems like this is more a beginner issue with electronics than a real electronics post might be. But anyway…
I am having a lot of issues with buzz and have been pretty thorough with trouble shooting and reducing the cause to one of two things:
1) my pup is a lemon, or 2) for reasons I don’t understand my ground wire is not making proper connection with the bridge.
I have played guitar for years and am familiar with noisy single coil pickups, but unless I am really mistaken, the buzz I am getting is not a matter of shielding (which I did). This is the first time I have done something like this so it’s not impossible that the issue is with my soldering joints, but I have been pretty methodical with soldering and stuck as best I can to what I understand to be standard best practices (no blowing on joints, pre tinning, cleaning the tip, pre tin again, and so on). Assuming I am correct about this, I went on with eliminating other possible causes by shortening the path bit by bit until I had the pickup going straight to the jack. When I was still getting a lot of noise at this point, just for curiosity sake, I decided to remove the ground wire to the bridge just to see if the noise changed in anyway and lo and behold, it did not. Thus I have come to think it is one of the two above stated issues.
My question is this, based on the picture here, can anyone think of why my ground wire would not be making sufficient contact with the bridge (not pictured, but when everything is assembled, the bridge sits right on top of the wire that I soldered to a small strip of copper foil) ?
The pickup is one of those Gretsch Electro Lap Steel Pickups that I got via Amazon for about $25.00. I don’t have another pickup to test out at the moment so can’t confirm there is any issue with this one, and before I go out and buy another one I want to be as sure as I can the fault lies here. On a somewhat different note though, Other than the buzz, the pickup actually has a nice warm tone, albeit lacking a little in the gain department when I want something nastier, but of course a simple stomp box would solve this issue.
So all that said, I would love to know what people think about this problem. I have never done any of this type of work before so am really unsure what else there is to try to locate the source of this problem.
Thanks!