Reducing Single-Coil Noise

[nineofkings]

I have a Yamaha Pacifica 112. It's essentially a fat strat with a different name. It has a beautiful, singing tone, especially with the neck pickup, especially in its higher register. My only problem with it is, as a strat-type, mostly single-coil pickup guitar, it has this horrid noisy interference when near fluorescent lights or (particularly inconveniently) computers.

So far I know of 3 ways around this.
1) internal magnetic shielding
2) noise-resistant pickups
3) playing inside of a Faraday cage at all times.
So I'm left with two real options and have never soldered before in my life. Is either method 1 or 2 superior, or is this a matter of taste? To take the quitter's way out, would my local music shop be able to shield my guitar's innards?

Thanks.

[tapper mike]

The guitar shops I know of will handle replacing the pickups for free so long as you purchase them there.


Personally I'd say go for some original lace sensors (blue, gold, silver, red) Avoid the new Lace pickups. or... Go for some Seymour Duncan Hot stacks. To me SD stacks sound the most convincing single coil while being hum cancelling. YMMV

[BertKoor]

Sometimes rotating the guitar by 90 degrees is enough to reduce picking up interference. And move away a couple meters...

[Hank the Knife]

Cover the inside with tin foil.

[Jim Y]

What Hank said.
Well, you can also get nice self adhesive copper foil - which isn't even supposed to need soldering, but some solder anyway. Whatever foil, it has to actually touch the guitars ground to work well. Also, if you have access to a multimeter, check the resistance from the bridge to the jack body - should be zero ohms but some guitars are faulty in that regard. When you've added foil, check that too for zero ohms to the jack ground.
It'll still be subject to some interference, not being a humbucker, but the foil screening usually makes it manageable.

[Mutant]

Get a portable recorder with good quality ADC and HI-Z input.
Go camping in a deep forest with no electromagnetic/static fields.
Be happy.

[nineofkings]

Thanks for your responses! To go the copper tape/tin foil route, I'd have to desolder the electronics to fully cover the insides of the body, right? That's what most sources I've seen seem to say.

[Mister Natural]

nine; I think you wanna try the shielding first, as you say that you love the sound of your pickup(s) as they are now. Also think you'd sleep better at night after getting a reputable GTR tech to do the work for you.

I'd also recco buying a shielded 3 conductor cable to replace your standard(2 conduct) GTR cable. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/8 ... _REAN.html
< may or may not make any difference but many recommend using only shielded "balanced" cables in the studio.

then I'd look at your amp. What are you using ? How is it being recorded ? < a lot of problematic links in that typical chain. Clean(vs high gain) is your friend

bottom-line is that single coil is always gonna have some measure of noise. The challenge is to manage it to it's minimum; best you can . . . just like Jimi did

peace

[Jim Y]

Maybe no need to solder. Next string change, take the plastic pick guard off and see if it already has foil on the back. This will be grounded by the switch body or whatever mounted on it. All you need then is to cover the bottom & walls of the pickup/wire cavities with foil with some overlap on top so that it makes contact with the pick guard foil when this is screwed back down. Check for any bare wire contacts on the back of the pickups and insulate with tape so it can't contact your added foil.

If Jimi had lasted a few years more he'd have been driven to humbuckers by the coming infestation of 27Mhz Citizens-band radio. Be thankful that craze died out!