| JB_volvoryda wrote on Tue, 11 October 2005 18:08 |
New to recording  . I recently purchased a BOSS BR-900CD. While using only my Acoustic Yamaha Compass Series guitar, I get a slight hum, which I believe is something to do with the ground. I can touch the chord and the hum goes away, but as soon as I let go, it comes back. Sometimes I will get no hum at all. I know it is not the recorder... could some ground wire inside my acoustic be screwy? Thanks.
And on a side note, does anyone have the BR-900? So far I'm impressed by what I've been getting out of it for both vocals and guitar...
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Yes, I've not seen this with acoustic guitars, but with electrics, some of the older guitars had the pu ground going to the bridge and just the bare wire placed under the bridge plate as it's screwed down and clamps it. This was the first path to typically wear out and it's the reason why some older guitars buzz. A clear indication of this is when you take your hands off of the strings and the buzz gets louder. Your body acts as a ground so touching the strings lowers the buzz. An easier fix than taking the bridge off and redoing the wire and also more stable as it's a soldered and not clamped to wood connection, is to run a wire between the volume pot or pu ground and solder it to the 1/4" cable jack, or if you have enough of the bridge wire to go to the jack just solder there, it'll do the same thing as grounding to the bridge. You said chord, I took that to mean a chord played on the guitar, if you are calling a cable a cord, the cable could have a malfunction. If one strand of the hot wire is touching ground you can get a hum and still plenty of signal. Bending the cable so that the strand goes off the ground would intermittently stop it. If the shield has been partially broken, you can get less ground when it's bent a certain way, that may cause some noise. Shaking or bending the cable may be a clue to that, but generally when the bridge has lost ground, taking your hand off of the strings will give the most noise. I recorded one guy with a bass that was buzzing real bad, after I offered him his choice of a jazz or P bass and 6 other basses that I had, he insisted that he use his bass. The buzz was completely unacceptable for a studio recording and I didn't want to have to spend the time to break his bass down for him and fix it, so I wrapped a wire around his elbow and tied it to the bridge post. Got the recording and he got to use the bass that he played best on. I heard them at a show a month later and the bass was still buzzing.
Another thing, if you are playing in an EMI field, you can often hear single coil pu's buzz, even when everything is wired correctly. If playing outside of the EMI field is out of the question, turning the neck of the guitar so that the strings are 90 degrees perpendiclar to the source of the EMI, will often reduce the buzz to an acceptable level to record. The strings act like an antenna, by paralleling the strings along the lines of flux rather than going across them will lower the buzz considerably.
