How to eliminate guitar hum with this complete shielding method
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- čas přidán 14. 08. 2024
- If you have any sort of hum on your guitar or bass it's likely you need to shield your cavities. In this video I show you step by step the best way to do this using NitorLACK's Conductive Shielding Paint.
Buy the NitorLACK Conductive Shielding Paint here:
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00:00 Intro, have you got a hum on your guitar or bass?
00:32 NitorLACK's paint on conductive shielding
00:46 How shielding paint works
01:20 Why you need to shield your guitar cavities
01:55 Protecting from and cleaning up spills
02:19 Should you shield Humbucker cavities?
02:55 Faraday cage, electromagnetic sources, and your guitar (or bass)
04:20 An important element of shielding - linking it all together
04:32 Shielding your scratch plate, using aluminium foil and why I don't like it
06:49 Connecting your control pots to the shielding, completing the ground loop circuit
07:16 Should I apply the shielding before or after the varnish top coat
07:55 Soldering the ground loop
08:06 Grounding the bridge
08:39 Why you shouldn't shield the input jack cavity (unless you know what you are doing)
09:25 Attaching the scratch plate or pickguard
09:38 See the finished guitar with a relic finish from NitorLACK and using my relic stencils
Here's my video showing how shielding makes a difference:
• Eliminate hum - proof ...
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If this video was useful please hit the Super Like button and consider tipping the price of a cup of tea. - Hudba
![GUITAR SHIELDING 101: A [Relatively] Quick Guide to Working with Foil Tape](/img/n.gif)
I'd like to have seen periodic continuity checks with an ohmmeter that has that function, to verify along the way that all of the cavities and hardware are making contact as expected. And I'd also recommend exploring copper foil tape, which comes in large sheets as well (convenient for the pickguard) and more importantly the adhesive is also conductive. Finally, it's worth noting that you can also improve the hum in single coil pickups without rewiring anything by detaching the pickups, twirling them round to twist their wires along their lengths and then reattaching them. Twisted-pair wires are essential in all mission-critical signal lines because they reject some interference.
That last tip is great. Next time I make a video like this I will do those continuity tests, good idea.
I love the shielding paint over foil tape. Looks so much cleaner. It also dresses up the cavities to make them look even and more professional. I di the shield paint in my first build doing my best to make sure the signal wires could not ground out. I did NOT however think about the ground wire for the battery circuit completing when it managed to touch the shield paint. took me four 9v batteries dead in under a month to figure that one out haha.
Great point about how neat it looks too. I hate batteries in guitars, something always goes wrong somewhere for me and they run out super quickly.
@@DevilAndSons I only ever had that problem once. Most cases batteries last well over a year for me and I have even had them still play over two years several times with my 1986 Washburn RR11v that I put my first ever EMG HM-1 in.
Even though it’s something I know, it was still an interesting watch with my my morning brew. That’s a really cool tip with the eyelets which is why it’s always worth watching things like this so thanks for that 🙂
For quick and cheap, I’ve used kitchen foil and spray mount in the past to ground the pickguard of a problematic guitar. Grounding out the jack socket? 🙋♂️ did that on my first build last year 🤦♂️! How do you find that shielding paint for mess? I have, rustins I think it is and it gets everywhere. I look like a 3 year old with a 6B pencil
Glad to offer a breakfast accompaniment. I was using rustins too. I find it's not too messy if you are careful but your hands slowly get dirtier as you wire things up. This one actually seems much better on that front.
I had that same issue with it being a bit runny. When I did my first ggbo it was on the endangered species list so I ended up trying MG Chemicals 841WB Super Shield paint. It is Nickle based and seems to coat better. I like that more than the carbon based stuff albeit slightly more expensive.
I've not tried the shielding paint. I use aluminium foil (from the kitchen), one continuous piece, moulded to fit the cavity, glued down with Pritt Stick, and overlapped like the guy here did with the paint. No need for eyelets: wrap bare wire around the screw before tightening it. Anywhere components might accidentally contact the foil, put a layer of insulation tape. I did try conductive copper tape, but it seemed to alter the tone, whereas aluminium doesn't.
Interesting method, thanks for sharing. I should make a video that compares the tone of the materials.
@@DevilAndSons Thank you. I expect you'd need an oscilloscope, and then it would turn out there's no difference, and it was all in my mind!
Ha, it could be. Every now and then I look at old oscilloscopes on ebay. They look so cool.
Or buy copper tape with conductive glue
Do you prefer the tape? I think I prefer it for the pickguards. I have noticed most people don't buy the conductive glue tape, that copper slug tape seems popular.
I need a t-shirt that says "subpar guitarist".
I'm sure many people will relate to you in that.
*So, where's the before and after evidence?* As an electrical/electronics engineer, I don't like to correct people in an offensive way, but when this makes an improvement, it's not actually a Faraday cage effect but rather, a higher conductivity antenna than your inductors so the interference drops a significant amount more of the signal across the antenna you have installed so that less is conducted by your pickups.
*There is a school of belief that it doesn't work whatsoever, but I've seen otherwise many times and achieved it myself in the past.* I've also had it fail miserably no matter what I did lol!
There are other ways of ridding it, but it's a can of worms. The ideal way is to build a +/- Bandpass filter of 105 dB per slope @90° each. The isolation creates a plateau your signal sits on above the noise source. To build this, it's 70 active RC networks lol!
*I built one @72 Hz with 32 dB high pass a couple months ago,* and it made a great reduction but it still easily needed to be doubled to dramatically reduce it and I'm estimating 105 dB so it's 100% inaudible, even at extremely high gain settings.
Although I am a heavy metal and instrumentalist shredder, I absolutely love the sound of single coils over humbuckers and absolutely loath noise gates. I plan to tackle this conundrum sometimes this year, but it will truly be a labor of love. *I have eliminated a ton of noise other ways, but this involves a brutal low pass filter gutting your signal of treble and some mids, them reintroducing it in a gain stage sourced from the harmonic content after gutting the signal.* It works and your treble/mids sound great and are clearly there, but as soon as you turn up the treble on that particular high gain pedal I designed and built, you realize just how much you've sacrificed.
*This means designing and building a crazy dB active high-pass filter if not bandpass to lose nothing whatsoever, other than the noise!* Aside from all the noise gone, the way it projects your signal will be a massive advantage in performance of the signal in general, not just the loss of noise. I've experienced this in general with some of my filter builds and experiments.
I actually have a video showing that the shielding, even if applied badly and not completely linking up, does help reduce the noise considerably. I'll link it in the next comment.
czcams.com/video/_N5xPRFo5kE/video.html
@@DevilAndSons I'm aware it works if the right material is used, there's enough of it and it is properly grounded. Another guy was ranting at me that it does nothing, but I have a formal education in the science of electrical/electronics engineering and know better.
*It's ultimately that you're building a lower impedance antenna than the pickups, and the RF voltage drops across the shielding to ground more than it does across the inductors that your pickups are built out of.* You're building an additional circuit functioning as an antenna to the RF induction noise that has less resistance to ground.
This is why some people do it and the material they select produces a very low impedance "antenna" that greatly reduces the noise, other people buy another material source, and it does nothing.
*28 years ago before I had been to college, I grounded the house outlet I was using by using a ground clamp on a waterpipe, and that with a huge gauge ground wire linked to the power strip in my bedroom wiped out 70% of the ground noise.* Touching the metal did nothing and even super high gain, there was almost nothing unless I turned on a TV or got near a spiral CFL bulb.
*My current setup has no buzz with most of my rigs, and I have many, I don't run a noise gate and touching the metal grounded circuit of the guitar changes nothing.*
It can be eliminated a multitude of ways including at the wall socket. There are many sources of induction noise in a common home setup, and these people are just inept to the fact that you can track down the sources and resolve it from ever reaching your instrument. *I think some are just bitter having spent $50 or whatever it was, putting in a lot of work but their material source was low quality, built a high impedance circuit and they eliminated nothing lol.* I've been there too.
@JonDeth I remember the first time I came across a system that grounded at the plug end, it made a massive difference at the very basic rehearsal studios we used where you would often get the sound of the guitars from the room next door faintly coming through your cabs!
@@DevilAndSons if you research studios, particular very expensive home or semi-professional studios, you will eventually find some who build with elaborate ground strapping systems and an isolated ground circuit only the studio is tied into. I researched isolated grounds for my current home, and it's I think a rod buried 6 feet deep to meet code and expected performance, or you can dig a trench to I think it's 2 feet deep with a 6' iron rod buried underneath.
I plan to build an isolated ground circuit for my studio but will also build some ultra steep active RC filters to isolate signals by 105 dB, maybe more, from the atmospheric conditions and potential induction noise caused by high draw devices within range of the equipment. The 32 dB high pass I built at 72Hz was a massive improvement for single coils in my bedroom gear, and going steeper will make it vanish 100% even with gain on a cascade set to the roof. *Many things work, but nothing is a guaranteed improvement let alone a complete remedy.*