Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

Hey Mikey, I know you use a lot of pedals at a time in your setup. Im getting a lot of noise out of my pedal board.

I run from a wireless into a Boss Tuner, to a Morley Wah, to a Tube Screamer, to a Chorus Pedal, then heres where my problems seem to come from my Whammy pedal is real noisy, and then to a Line 6 Delay Modeler. Im getting a lot of hum out of my setup. I may have started running my amps a lot hotter. We have a Halloween show and I would like to clean up the sound. Would a noise gate be the way to go or add a bypass loop for the Whammy and Delay be a better option. Lots of songs I dont use anything but the screamer and wah.

Any input you or any one else post would help. Its tuesday morning, I plan on getting into this tonight tuesday night and see what I can do to eliminate the noise.

well sir, there's a lot of possible issues here...

noise typically comes from cheap adapters and/or unclean power. dc brick, and others help combat this. I use 1spots (cheap but not bad) but I have them all plugged into a good power conditioner. try putting the 'bad pedals' on batteries and see if the issue goes away... if so then this is where you do your work.

noise can also come from a bad cable... even if it has a seemingly good solder joint... it could be cold... haveing a tb loop is nice for finding this. put all pedals on a tb loop and bypass them all... then flip the true bypass on and off and see the difference.

frankly, unless you paid $500 or more for your wireless... it is likely a source of at least some noise but if it's not something you recently added you can probably move on.

Now noise and tone-suck aren't the sm thing... but if I were you I'd def have every pedal you have on a tb loop - and ideally each one on it's own tb loop or at least two of them so that you never have more than two non-tb pedals on at one time. especially the wah as they are well known to be tone suckers.

I absolutely hate noise gates. some use them... I hate them. IMO you need to address the noise before it's in your signal path bcuz if there's noise when you stop playing... that noise is there when you r playing.

the screamer itself has a pretty good buffer and they tend to not suck tone... so it's probably fine outside of a truebypass loop... unless you have three or four of them like me(grinning).

Ooh I should have read this earlier..

Mikey its in my Whammy, its the black Whammy II. Ive thought about putting it on an independent loop to isolate it. If I take it out the unit is fairly quiet, but I use the Whammy for quite a few things these days. Just a drop at the end of a song, a 5th harmony to thicken leads and such. I only have one more gig obligated with my main band so Im not too worried about it. That noise is the sound of power or rock n roll to me.

Thanks, your post made a lot of sense to me.

my pleasure... hope it's useful.

afa the whammy... have you tried running on batteries? You may try running it b4 any dist or comp cause those will boost it's noise.

i hate eq's but you could try an eq after and drop out top freq to eliminate it...

you could isolate it's power supply from your other ones and plug it directly into the wall...

you could open it up ans see if you've got a bad solder joint on the grnd at the input jack...

just some thoughts.
cheers,
mv

Mikey a lot of things I do I dont use the Whammy, It cant run on batterys.

Thanks for your info

roger that... I'd dip it in lead then. (hehe)

I fooled with it some more and Ive got enough wire to just unhook it. I only use it on Killing In The Name and Whole Lotta Love, or at least thats the only 2 songs that its essential in to get my parts across, so I will just hit bypass and rewire it real quick this weekend.

Dip It In Lead, huh?

Sounds like a song title to me.

Just be a good girl and roll over, is something Ive been working on, the other night the girlfriend says to me Be a good boy and roll over, and I did! But thats a whole nother story in itself!

for some reason I'm reminded of a song I heard at summerfest one year...

if you go in to the kitchen and u r looking for a condom just use seran wrap.

unbelievable gtr playing... can't recal the bands name but it was interesting to say the least.

I say just dip it in lead.

Mikey I really tore into my board today.

I have a Pedal Pad which has 2 interior chambers to route cables, so I moved all the power from my whammy and delay modeler into an area away from the other power cords. I have this HumX thing that Ive had for years so I plugged the amp into it and Ive reduced the noise enough to not worry about it. I think my power cables were crossing each other at weird angles and it was giving me a lot o noise.

Thanks for your advice!

hmm interesting... I never even considered that as a possibility. I've built my pedal boards to keep 95% of my cable above and my power wiring below... I guess it's just never been an issue for me so I missed that one.
I appreciate you posting... it's good to know!

I crossed some of the power wires with my amp on and it made a lot more noise when I crossed them. I forget these things sometimes and I think that in transporting the unit it made the cables move around on me.

This might help others building up a board. The pedal pad has internal power for most of my pedals but the Whammy and Delay are seperate, so I put thier wires in a seperate chamber away from the others and the patch cables. There is still some noise cause my whammy pedal is a noisy unit. The hum eliminator I had been using I was plugging into the pedal pad supply, but last night I put it on my amp line and it quieted things down quite a bit without any tone loss that I can detect. I would prefer to just run straight into my amp, but I use these effests quite a bit and I dotn have any set pattern for them. I may kick into a U2 type delay on slower stuff just to change it up. So I hate to isolate effects with a bypass. Of course I should put the chorus, whammy and delay on one just to get rid of the noise.

I also play with quite a bit of gain on the amp. I did cut it back and use the tube screamer to get the cut I like but my sound is really harsh and in your face, I use the volume on my guitar a lot to get my sound. I play Les Paul Classics and they have extrememly hot pickups, so I just roll the volume on around 2-5 most of the time, but I can go higher and really make it cut.

Thanks Mikey for your input, maybe someone else will see this and add to it, or use some of this info, I personally hate noise gates, they just sound unnatural to me no matter where you set the threshold. I guess if your sh*t is screaming when you arent playing they work but for me I like a natural more organic sound to my guitar.

Mikey, Im reporting back after my Halloween gig, the guys mentioned that my rig was a lot quiter than they had gotten used too.

I had a reallly wierd occurence. My drummer told me after the first set that he needed more guitar in the monitors. So I turned it up just a little bit in the monitor, We went into Man In The Box and my guitar was roaring, it was like I doubled the volume or something. I turned it completely out of the monitors, still way loud, I finally just cut my amp way way back and we were fine. I guess it was a Halloween thing cause I had everything at a nice comfortable level at the end of the first set, I didnt change anything, didnt touch my amp, of course our singer thought I had jacked my amp way up, ha ha I was known for that a few years ago. Anyway it was like a ghost got into the machine.

LOL JW, your singer sounds like Bon Scott!

How come you pussies don't do any AC*DC?

Lets see Scott we do WHole Lotta Rosie, Highway To Hell, Dirty Deeds, TNT, The Jack and have done Let There Be Rock, U Shook Me All Night, Hells Bells, Back In BLack, Problem CHild, Big Balls

I dont know why us pussys dont do any AC/DC, maybe you can tell me?