Irritating Buzz

7daze

Hi All,

I'm trying to track down and eliminate some noise from my home recording setup. Over the weekend I dusted off my old Boss GT-3. I plugged the pedal's mono output into the input of my Tascam 122 and monitored the sound using headphones (also connected to the Tascam.)

There was quite a bit of hum/buzz when using certain patches on the GT-3. The noise would lessen if I would touch the metal housing on the cable plugged into the guitar (I'm using fairly decent Neutrik cables). I could also make the noise worse by touching or moving my hand close to one of the guitar pickups.

I get a similar noise if I plug in my acoustic electric (the noise will also drastically reduce if I hold onto the cable housing)

Any thoughts on where the problem may lie?

PaulBrewer

Earthing ! or rather Shielding

Nip into your local music shop and get them to check your guitar, cables and pedals.

TelePaul

Does this setup buzz when you plug the Boss unit into an amp?

7daze

TelePaul wrote: »

Does this setup buzz when you plug the Boss unit into an amp?

I plugged it into the amp's effect return and the sound is mostly noise free. (a slight hum on some of the high gain patches)

dasdog

You tried using headphones directly/tried an aux in rather than the standard input (if applicable) as it's most likely the boss unit seeing as that's what you've just introduced. When you say some patches I take it you mean loud/distored ones that just amplify the problem but it might be an idea to check patches that bypass certain switches/expression pedal etc (again if applicable). The external wire of the power supply for my GFX-8 was horribly cheap and eventually frayed but I was able to track down a similar replacement from an electrical supplier. If you think it's power related you might be better off getting someone qualified to look at it.

TelePaul

I think there are still too many variables to say it's a dodgy output jack or busted lead. Have you tried the US122 with a different guitar you know to be working? Does the Boss manual explicitly state it should be placed in the FX loop?

7daze

TelePaul wrote: »

I think there are still too many variables to say it's a dodgy output jack or busted lead. Have you tried the US122 with a different guitar you know to be working? Does the Boss manual explicitly state it should be placed in the FX loop?

I don't think it explicity says to go through the fx loop but I usually plug in this way to bypass the amp's built in preamp and use the pedal's preamp sim. I'm happy with the sound quality I'm getting with this setup.

The US122 works well with my condender mic - using the same input jack as I use with the guitar - no noise there.

When I use my semi-acoustic plugged directly from guitar to tascam unit I get quite a bit of noise. The noise goes away when I touch the metal cable housing where it goes into the guitar jack - so this might be the shielding/earthing I need to look at? Or just a cheap pickup?

TelePaul

7daze wrote: »

I don't think it explicity says to go through the fx loop but I usually plug in this way to bypass the amp's built in preamp and use the pedal's preamp sim. I'm happy with the sound quality I'm getting with this setup.

The US122 works well with my condender mic - using the same input jack as I use with the guitar - no noise there.

When I use my semi-acoustic plugged directly from guitar to tascam unit I get quite a bit of noise. The noise goes away when I touch the metal cable housing where it goes into the guitar jack - so this might be the shielding/earthing I need to look at? Or just a cheap pickup?

Alright, so process of elimination would suggest a grounding issue, but you said this happened with your electric through the Tascam too, right? That's what's throwing me, as it's difficult to determine whether this problem stems synthetically from, say, an extreme distortion patch with a high noise floor or a specific hardware problem (poor shielding/grounding).

7daze

TelePaul wrote: »

Alright, so process of elimination would suggest a grounding issue, but you said this happened with your electric through the Tascam too, right? That's what's throwing me, as it's difficult to determine whether this problem stems synthetically from, say, an extreme distortion patch with a high noise floor or a specific hardware problem (poor shielding/grounding).

Yes the problem occurs with both guitars but when playing through the GT-3. The problem can be somewhat masked my certain patches and made worse by others. Clean, compressed and bassy guitar sounds seem to be the best noise wise.

With the semi-acoustic I've tried a few different things like using a jack to XLR cable from guitar to tascam but this just changes the 'frequency' of the noise and the volume of the signal (it's lower)

And going back to the powersupply question a few posts back: I did gig quite heavily with the unit a few years ago so the powersupply did take a bit of a pounding.