This guy claims wiring your strat as he suggest will eliminate the hum from normal single coils. Some of what he says actually makes sense but I'm sceptical.

If I had an inexpensive squier or MIM I might try it. Maybe one of you builders that frequent this establishment could test this out and lets us know what the results are.

The Silence of the Strat

Cheers,

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

I guess since I've been playing Strats for so long the hum doesn't bother me,when I'm not playing the volume is on 0,as soon as the song is finished.
I played a Les Paul for many years and still have it,the humbuckers in that guitar don't sound near as lively and sparkling as the single coils,for my blues/rock style,I'll stay with them just as they are.
The noise from single coils are worrisome to some,especially newcomers to Strats,and they try all sorts of things to quiten them.

Well, as an electrical engineer, I will agree that the pickups act as antennas. That's pretty obvious. As for the rest of the article, well ......

The author's contention that a guitar circuit is a balanced circuit is ridiculous in my opinion. Anyone that has accidently switched the hot and ground leads at the guitar's output jack knows that the guitar buzzes like crazy. I don't know how you "push a signal only down the grounded side" of the circuit. A pickup will not "feed the same signal in the same polarity down both the hot and ground". I have no idea what he is talking about. Of course you might get a shock if you stand on a concrete floor in your bare feet and you plug you amp into the outlet using a ground lift adaptor. YOU are now acting as the ground. DUH.

I have no clue what his "crude wiring diagram" is supposed to show.

What is "pudding.zip" supposed to prove?

The rest of the article is so confused and confusing as to be worthless.

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Bill

I'm not sure what he means by "balanced". He's not an EE and his terminology makes no sense.

I'm assuming his diagram is just the pickups and the 5-way switch. Not that hard to see. I'd prefer if he'd post a complete diagram with pickups, controls, switch, output jack, and ground connection.

If I get curious enough maybe I'll find a dirt cheap squier and see if I can duplicate whatever it is he's doing

I'm assuming pudding.zip, which unzips to pudding.wav, is supposed to be a demonstration that his axe doesn't hum. A before and after comparison would have been better. A video of him cranking the amp way up and then turning up the volume on the guitar would have been a better demo.

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

Agree on all counts. In my opinon, a decent wiring diagram would be an absolute necessity to understand what he is doing.

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Bill

I read and reread his postulation (or whatever you want to call it) several times, thinking I must have missed something; this, coupled by the fact that it is far from a clear, concise presentation. All I could interpret from it was his claim that there is some sort of dormant electronic activity going on in the coils of non-selected pickups. Consider: How can anything be dormant and active simultaneously? Notwithstanding, that if one reverses a half-disconnected pickup's phasing while running this half-connected pickup through a capacitor exclusive of any tone pot, the root cause of 60 cycle hum shall be nullified. Plain and simple, this is absolutely preposterous! Guaranteed though, this nonsense shall wind up in the ever growing, ever absurd compendium we all know and love as, "Infallible Web Dogma".

As always, this is merely IMO where YMMV.

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You dig?

As I said in my first post, about the only thing I will agree with in the article is that pickups and indeed, the entire wiring of the guitar (including the connecting cable) can act as antennas. I have posted about this before in regard to a phenomenon I have observed in my own home.

All of my guitars are equipped with PAF type, Filtertron type, and stacked type humbucking pickups. I absolutely hate 60 hz noise. However, my home appears to be located in an RF hotspot (But I can only get 1 bar on my cellphone in my house!). I live about 20 miles from Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia. The airport is not a problem, but one of the outer marker radio beacons is about 1/2 mile from my home. My home is also with 2 miles of the National Reconnaissance Office and within about 5 miles of a major CIA installation. I also have knowledge of several covert/classified facilities near my home (Yes, I work in the Intelligence community.). Not to mention all the contractor's offices that surround these facilities. All are equipped with satellite dishes and other digital or analog transceiver equipment. On almost every Sunday night between about 11:00 pm and 12:00 midnight my guitars a plagued by a loud, raspy buzz. It is definitely not 60 Hz hum and is definitly not coming from my home wiring or Internet connection. I can only conclude that it is radiated noise being picked up by the guitar pickups or wiring and blasting through my amps. If I unplug the guitar from the amp, the noise goes away. I can turn the volume down on the guitar and the noise changes. I can switch pickups and the noise changes. It appears to be worse with the bridge pickup of my Strat (which is equipped with Fender SCN pickups), but all my guitars are affected to a great extent.

After investigating all possible causes for the noise in my home I have reached what appears to me to be the only logical cause of the problem: It is either a transmission from one of the several systems within a few miles of my home or it is space aliens. Since the voices in my head stopped some time ago, I tend to go with the government building theory as the source of the noise.

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Bill

The church I play in induces a lot of noise. Even guitars with humbuckers buzz like single coils. I've been told it's caused by the light dimmers. I use Planet Waves Custom guitar cables which are 100% shielded according to the marketing hype. They helped a lot but it doesn't eliminate the noise.

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In my opinion Leo Fender had essentially perfected the guitar amplifier by 1964.

I've also been hammering away the fact that pickups act as antennas for years now. Evidently, this guy heard/read something somewhere either directly or indirectly related to the issue and infused his personal interpretation of how he thinks such signals can be (re)routed. Regardless, his postulation most likely has already earned immortality along with all the other absolute, irrefutable wisdom found among Infallible Web Dogma (IWD) circles.

Again, as always, this is merely IMO where YMMV.

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You dig?

I too use Planet Waves cables. Makes no difference in this situation. I've also determined that the dimmer in my room has no effect on things. Nor does my computer which is in the same room.

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Bill

"But I read it on the Internet, so it has t be true."

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Bill

Well then, if this be the case, I stand corrected!!!

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You dig?

I can't understand how y'all have so many problems in churches and homes and I play in beer joints and roadhouses and everything in between with all manners of bad wiring and have little to no trouble with all my Strats with single coils....does that make me lucky or what....

I think he is saying that the switched-out coils are still electrically connected to ground when open (true). And that they act like antennas (true). And they add noise to the ground circuit (true). And this noise gets amplified and you hear it (false -- this is where he goes wrong).

He claims "if you understood the nature of electrical biasing as it applies to a 'common', any signal applied to that common is merely the inverse of a signal that would "magically" appear on the hot side of the circuit." Again, this is just plain wrong.

The reality is that it doesn't matter what the voltage is at the ground as the amplifier is responding only the voltage difference between the ground and the hot side of the jack. These switched out coils make no contribution to this voltage differential. There are no "magically" created voltages.

When my guitar instructor plugs one of his single coil Strats into one of my amps at my house, it is very quiet. If he then hands that same guitar to me, it hums and buzzes like a bumble bee. I think the fact that I outweigh him by about 50 pounds, making me a much larger ground plane, may have something to do with it.

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Bill