About a year ago I purchased a custom pick guard assembly for my Highway One Strat which is a copy of the electronics featured in the David Gilmour Signature Strat. I have a Fender Fat 50's pickup in the neck, a custom '69 pickup in the middle, and a Duncan SSL-5 in the bridge position. Since I installed it I have noticed a considerable hum coming through the amp. I had taken the guitar to a local guitar tech and had him check my grounding, the only wires I had to solder in were for the body ground connection and the one to the jack, which he said was fine. I have also shielded the inside of the body cavities with conductive copper tape to no avail. The sound it makes does not change when I touch the strings, however it does change if more than one pickup is turned on, or if I move about the area I'm playing in. I love the guitar's sound, the signal is nice a clear however there's always this droning hum in the background that drives me bonkers. Any suggestions?

~~Tom

Welcome Tom.

The fact that the guitar does not quiet down when you touch the strings implies that you are missing a ground wire to your tremolo claw.

I presume you know that none of your pickups are humbucking and therefore, in practical terms, your guitar will continue to hum to varying degrees at all times.

I've said this probably 50 times here but very few want to believe it: The polepieces of single coil pickups and the coils themselves are prominent receptors for pulling in electro-magnetic interference which is your noise/hum. Consider the coils and the polepieces as antennas for this. As neither the coils nor the polepieces get shielded themselves, any other shielding is superfluous as all it does is tend to attenuate the frequencies and output of the circuit itself (albeit, to varying degrees). In your particular situation, shielding the inside of the body is virtually useless as it is already shielded. As a matter of fact, it is counter intuitive in the sense that this redundant shielding can actually contribute to the hum. Obviously, you're complaint confirms these conditions when physically moving around or in changing pickup selection(s) for with the changing of pickup selection(s), the DC resistance of the circuit changes as well.

Then there's a whole bunch of other criterion too: Your house wiring, the quality of the cables you use, the quality of your amp, how it is set, how many preamps you do or don't use, how they are set, their quality; the list goes on and on.

Now I'm not telling you what to do but if I owned your guitar, I'd rip out that copper shielding, check the claw ground and verify the quality of the guitar's wiring in general. There's also a trick which not too many people know or use: With unshielded pickup leads, if the guitar is rather noisy, by twisting the leads around each other from the pickup all the way and as close as possible to where they are going to be soldered in the control cavity, this wrapping of the wires will help repel some of the aforementioned electromagnetic interference.

Another remedy is, you could always install a calibrated dummy coil or coils to make the pickups either hum reduced or outright humbucking. The only drawback here is that you MAY loose a touch of high end per pickup where the good news is, a tweak of the amp will bring it right back.

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This guitar never had a ground running to the tremolo plate when I took the stock pickguard out. It only had a ground running to a loop that was actually screwed into the inside of the front cavity. This guitar hummed a little bit with the stock electronics in however nowhere near as loudly, and yes I knew that single coil pickups, unless noisless, will hum. The hum was there before I shielded the inside of the guitar and did not change at all when I installed the shielding, as for the wiring itself, everything was done by overdrive custom guitar works in California, the only thing I had to solder myself was the jack. Gear wise, I use monster cables in and out of my pedal board, which I know hisses on its own. I have taken the board out of the equation and plugged directly into my amp, a blackstar ht-5 mini stack, with the monster cable and the hum is still there. This is all with the amp set very clean. Any other suggestions?

~~Tom

Correction on the last post, there is a ground to the tremolo plate, and it is connected, but there is also a wire to a body ground inside the guitar.

I've pretty much covered everything and without a hands-on inspection, I'm done.

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Thanks for your input.

You're welcome.

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