[BackToBlack]

Ok Guys and Gals. Try this one on for size. I run my electric strat through my distortion pedal, yet when I crank up the tone and distotion up on the pedal, out comes this unbearable buzzing from my amp. I can't crank up even crank up tone, high, or gain without that dang buzzing. I am thinking this happens because I have a whimpy 19 watt amp. Do I need a bigger more powerful amp?? Thanks.

[P-90]

Originally Posted by Noodler

The Noise-Reducer made my dual humbucker guitar quiet as a mouse at full gain, but as soon as I wasn't touching metal on guitar, oh, the hiss! (Even with noise reducer on).

I wonder if hi-gain just makes any shielding issues you have come top the fore?

Have you ever looked under the pickguard and seen if there was a wire in place which connected your bridge or tailpiece to ground? That will usually kill off noise problems related to touching the strings, but not all guitars have 'em.

[Noodler]

Forgive my ignorance here (I started another thread to ask), but where is the ground? I was under the impression that the bridge was the ground somehow. I'm sure I read that somewhere, like a magazine...

Feel free to put in $2 here:

How do you shield/ Earth guitar

[P-90]

The bridge *should* be grounded, but sometimes guitars lack wires to connect them to ground, and other times (as in fly135's case) they come loose and fail to make proper electrical contact.

If it does turn out that your bridge isn't grounded, I would recommend doing so, but I would also recommend putting in a 220k, 1/4 watt resistor, in parallel with a .001 capacitor (>450 v rating, to be safe). The reason for this is: if you're touching the strings, and they're grounded, and you touch another piece of equipment which is malfunctioning, the current from the malfunctioning equipment can go to ground through *you* -- I'm sure that you've heard of Mick Jagger and various other musicians almost getting killed by faulty microphone hookups like that. But ungrounded strings WILL be noisy. If you ground them, but add the resistor to limit possible current flow, and the capacitor, to filter off RF interference, most of the noise will go away, but faulty equipment will limit you to a tingly, non-dangerous warning shock of around 40 volts, rather than a potentially lethal 400.

To clarify where ground IS in your guitar, let's talk about what ground is in general. It is the electrical potential of the Earth, where all of our electron deficits or surpluses are resolved. The earth prong in your wall outlet is exactly that -- it connects to a wire that hooks up to something like a metal pipe, which runs straight into the ground. So when you call it ground or earth, you mean exactly that. Electrically, it is at one with the Earth.

Obviously, no guitar is normally connected to the Earth. For that, it has to be hooked up to a cord, which is, in turn, hooked up to an amp. The cord has 2 things it carries; one is the signal, and the other is the connection to ground, which is provided by the amp (and flows out the amp's power cord's third prong to the actual Earth). For you to get any signal from your guitar, some parts have to have a connection to something resembling ground. One of your pickup leads, for example, and your volume and tone control pots, must be connected in that way. But not your bridge/strings. Your guitar will function with an ungrounded bridge, it will just be noisy.

So the idea is to look for a wire which connects the bridge to something like the metal housing on one of your tone or volume controls. It's probably either missing altogether, or is not making good electrical contact.