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Bucking the Stratocaster Hum!
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- čas přidán 6. 05. 2023
- This a video addressing the 60 cycle hum from Fender Stratocasters. The first part of the video addresses this issue with making a dummy coil. Making a dummy coil does not work out. However, success to "bucking" the hum was achieved by using a noise reduction system from Ilitch .com. Complete instruction for wiring the Ilitch and adjusting for maximum quiet while retaining the stratocaster tone.
I finished the dummy coil 5 minutes ago and it works amazingly well! Was a pice of cake. Took an old pickup and ran the wires to the volume pot chassis and selector switch. Having the pickup in the right orientation made a difference. I think you need to experiment with placement and which polarity the wiring needs to be in. You can always swap the wires if you can't re-position the dummy coil. I didn't shield it, just wrapped with electrical tape to prevent damaging the copper.
I put dummy coils in my Fender Mustangs and they worked great. You have to make sure the pickup is oriented right with the other pickups. If it's turned the wrong direction it will still hum so you may have to turn the dummy the other direction to get rid of the hum.
No, the dummy coil doesn’t need to have the same resistance, it should have same inductance. The way Ilitch dummy works, it has low resistance but bigger area so it senses the same amount of hum as regular pickup. Shielding works effectively only if you do it all the way, star grounding everything and removing all unneeded ground connections (even the one going from the volume pot). Wrapping the diy dummy in copper foil doesn’t do much ‘cause it’s already located inside Faraday cage you’ve just made, but it also doesn’t hurt much because it’s blocking RFI and not EMI noise (the one you want it to pick up). And the shielding has to be grounded to work anyway. Also with 5way super switch it’s possible to wire dummy only in positions 1,3&5 and it also can work with rwrp middle pup (remember the dummy has no polarity). In my experience, shielding and star grounding helps with every sort of noise besides 60Hz hum. I’d say it removes 99% of RFI white noise and maybe 40% of 60Hz hum (with the added bonus of eliminating buzz when you lift the hands off the strings). For total removal of 60Hz hum you have to use some sort of dummy. Ilitch is the best but pretty expensive for a coil of copper wire.
Thanks for a great video. Your experiments do save all of us a lot of frustration, and for that we appreciate you for doing it. There is another video where a guy just took an old pickup and removed everything except the coil wire; he just wired it between the volume and switch, and it seemed to work perfectly. There was nothing spoken about resistance at all. But your discoveries are definitely helpful and they reveal that there may be more to this than meets the eye. I was going to try it out, thinking it was a sinch, but I'll be ready in case I have some of the same things begin to happen. Thanks!
Tips i have are...
Farraday cage and star wiring.
If for example, your middle pickup is a north like the bridge and neck, it isnt hard to reverse the polarity to south for the middle pickup of needed, to help noise in middle and bridge and middle and neck positions.
I removed the middle pickup and used a de-magnitiser in an engineering shop to get rid of the magnetism of the middle pickup. The de-magnetiser is used after surface grinders on magnetic tables to make steel non magnetic.....
Then I put two neodymium magnets on the jaw faces of a vise, ensuring one jaw had a north and the other a south. I then passed the pickup between the magnets the correct way. The polarity was reversed and the pickup sounds just the same as before with the same ohm resistance, but less noise in the combined positions.
Use a compass to determine pickup polarity.
This is really good. I thought about trying this and thank you for sharing!
The dummy coil must be REVERSE WOUND if you want anything to happen, and most single coils are wound the same way, except for some middle single coils which are advertised as reverse wound. Anyway, if you don't build the coils yourself, you still have to buy a "special pickup" that you'll basically destroy. So !!!
If you flip it upside down it will be reverse wound
@@grabslideI know that was the belief, but I don't believe that is true.
Thanks for sharing. I fight hum in any way I can find. I use power strips that have built-in RFI filters like the Furman Power Conditioner (SS6B). 60 and 120hz are audio frequencies, and some amps are more prone to let hum stand out more than others, so I keep a close eye in the treble at the amp and the guitar tone pots if I am using an amp that tends to be fizzy or way too bright. I dial back treble if that is the case. I gravitate towards amps and speaker models that do not get too fizzy, even at the highest treble settings. Examples: I have a Yamaha Fifty 112 with an EVM 112L speaker that happens to keep me away from hum. I also added a filter choke to my 1966 tube Teisco, in which has a Celestion Rola speaker. These are not things guaranteed to get rid of hum, but it helps me a lot.
Sounds like you have some content to do a video!
I have tried them all....in the end, high quality noiseless sets (like kinmans) are simply perfection...all the tone,zero noise and if you think they are expensive just be on the lookout to get them used...i have three sets of them( along with dimarzio areas) and i can get rid of a guitar but the pickups sets always stay.....
Now if you wanna keep your singles but reduce the hum considerably the best solution i would recommend is to get a freeway switch....using that switch you get your usual 5 strat positions but you also get 5 more some of those are the pickups wired in series making them essentially humbuckers and reducing the hum considerably....the good news in this case is that you can hop from one to another with the flick(literally) of the switch so when you want to..buck the hum you simply get on of these positions and you are golden plus you now have a humbucker sound in the bridge and neck whenever you feel like it without any destructive mod to your guitar.
Great stuff! Checking it out!
Nice guitar ! Thank you for the demonstration 😊
Thank you too!
Very informative and well produced video. I have a strat with Seymour Duncan _Little 59s_ (strat sized humbuckers) in the bridge and neck with the SD _Duckbucker_ in the middle. No noise, and sounds very pleasant, even if different from the stock single coils.
Thank you!
A great friend just brought up good question. He asked how do you connect the copper shielded area in the jack cavity to the main shieled area under the pickguard. I soldered a wire to connect both areas and then covered both spots with copper tape.
just use a shielded wire for hot going to your jack and ground the shielding to the ground on the jack and to a pot that the hot wire
connects to which is your volume pot. This way you don't need to worry about shielding the jack area on your strat.
I think that is part of the reason all the old blues guys seemed to play
Gibson type humbucker guitars it must have been terrible with a Strat
type guitar back then with all the neon and the electrical code was pretty
much non existent.
On the dummy coil thing - surely you would not want to shield it like that (that might be the closest thing to an actual Faraday cage on a pickup). You want it to pick up the same interference as the "playing" coil so as to supply the "inverse" signal.
The Dummy Coil is getting BLOCKED by the pickguard to pickup up the same interference and copper shielding of the guitar cavity so its best to locate the dummy coil external in a guitar pedal enclosure that is NON-Shielded and has an antenna also?
Actually, I did some tests with the dummy coil before shielding that did not make the video. Same result…however, there was some improvement with the shielding.
I had a Suhr guitar with the SSC. It was really nice to have.
Gotta go Ilitch, or Suhr - those 2 "Did it Right" = Noiseless pickups (have come a long way) but still can't give you that Airy-Top-End like a True single-coil. I've tried em.
Excellent video!
Series parallel wiring, microcoil, shielding, Ehx hum debugger, anything else?
I have not heard of that one, how much?
This is really gonna PO a bunch of purist off. I built this funky cheap Strat for a video prop last year. And dropped a preloaded P-Gaurd from Stratosphere it was the hot Texas set. They are the quietest SSS set I've ever used. So much so I yanked them out and put them in my person session guitar. They sound quite "vintage" also. just an FYI
Thanks for interesting video.
Thank you for watching.
You weren't wrong with Ulbrick - They also make a "dummy coil" system.
I would look at what Fender does with the Noiseless pickups.
I have tried the noiseless pickups in a Jeff Beck Strat, & maybe it is me. But they just didn’t have the same tone.
Notice the new coil isn't in a faraday cage. There reason for the hum is that the pickups act like antennas and pick up EM interference. The dummy coil does the same but is connected out of phase. thus canceling the unwanted interference signal.
Dummy coils CAN work but physical positioning is crucial, also if the mid pu. is reverse wound it can get you issues. FWIW
Could you get the same effect for the bridge and neck if you just wired the volume to the middle pickup only? So turn the volume down on middle pu only so in positions 2 & 4 both are still hum cancelling as normal but you get the single bridge or neck pu tone?
I wonder if it was wired in series of parallel (I think it's parallel that it needs to be, I could be wrong though)
The metal tape should be put even where electronics is. On the pickguard. Copper tape here is the same of aluminum tape, cheaper. Very Better even of graphite paint.
Why don't you use a noise gate pedal?, or the Boss Katana has a built in gate
A gate seems to choke the notes too much for me especially with a noisy strat.
@@scanjazz777 Feels so unNatural to me too.
Oh no. A noise gate is totally the way to go. You just have to get the correct one. You need a new generation noise gate. They are completely advanced over the old choke type gates. They can be set to eliminate most or all of your noise, but retain 100% of your actual tone.
Lol, I just tried something similar today with a dummy coil. I can’t say it worked the way I wanted either. I’ll just go back to using hum-canceling pickups
I think Suhr’s solution maybe a little bit cheaper than Ilitch. It maybe worth trying and certainly let us know when you do.
I'm no electrician, but aren't you defeating the purpose of the dummy coil by wrapping it in foil tape? Doesn't that effectively shield the coil & prevent it from picking up / inverting the signal?
I forgot the name of the guy that demonstrated and I was following his direction.
Correction on the noise reduction company website url. www.ilitchelectronics.com/
I just use my compression pedal.
Isp noise gate
Now if one could just get rid of the annoying Stratocaster BARK sound. What is the BARK you ask the best discription i can give is it is the sound a Strat makes mainly with the wound strings, sounds like fret buzz, a fuzzyBuzzy sound/BARK. LOL. Strats also QUACK too, position 2 and 4 someone once called it Quack, I have not stopped laughing about it all these years. it of course is the thin/out of phase positions. 1st time I remember hearing it, was eric clapton 1st solo album the song LET IT RAIN.
I am familar with the out of phase quack but not so much the bark. The reason why I didn't go reverse wound
& polarity on the middle was I thought that it would be more authentic to the '54 strat sound. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the original '54 had a 3 way switch where players would jam the switch in positions 2 or 4. Reverse wound and polarity didn't happen until the early '90s.
@@scanjazz777 The 5 way switch did not come along til most likely 1974, sometime in that timeframe, it was added in 70's.
@@ksharpe10 Thank you that is great to know. 20 years before the 5 way and then another 20 for reverse wound reverse polarity for the middle pickup. Slow progress!
I believe you are correct about the original 54 have a three way switch and adjusting the switch in between the main positions to obtain a different sound.@@scanjazz777
Is it me or does it smell like burnt popcorn? 🍿
Jimmy Jamz!