A tip for single coils ground noise.

[tristan klein]

I got my L3 HSS in january and it came with an horrible ground noise on the single coils. As I know my place is VERY noisy ( my LP 59 VOS got some high frequencies noises ) I did not go further and just used my wireless ( line 6 relay G50 ) to record and had to deal with the noise when I played for myself.

But a few days ago my dad came with his fender select, and...no ground noise at all !!!

So I went to my tech ( I did not call the french importer, everybody here knows it's a waste of time...) he started by putting graphite in most cavities of the guitar, ( including screw holes of the neck ) but it did not fix anything.

He observed the problem deeper, and find a solution : connecting the neckjoint's backplate to the basement of the trem...and MIRACLE !!! No more ground noise AT ALL !!! Everything was connected to the ground except this.

He explained that it comes from a combination of mics output level & sensitivity and of course electrical environement.

It costed me 15 bucks and took 3 hours. The guy takes care of my guitars since I was 13 and never failed to find a solution to any problem we met !

I just put the wireless out of my pedalboard and I'm the happiest guitar player alive

I hope it could help !

 

[DrKev]

First, hooray!

I'm glad it worked out so well for you.

I will admit to confusion though - I'm not sure what problem was really solved. Now, I am very jet-lagged and at risk of getting things wrong, but allow me think out loud here for a minute...

There is no need to put graphite paint in the neck holes, as no part of the electrical circuit is inside those holes. And Music Man guitars already are well shielded - electrical conducting paint is already used, under the colour coats. So additional graphite inside the guitar should not make things better. (Won't make things worse either though, and you are now double sure it's well done so no big deal).

Shielding the cavities can be useful for some types/sources of noise. However single coils are by their very nature are basically a loop antenna, much of which is outside the shielded cavity, so shielding the cavity won't help single coil noise very much.

So we have three reasons why the graphite shielding should not have fixed anything, which is what happened. So far so good.

Now, if he put graphite paint in the neck holes, the graphite paint has to be grounded (it's 100% useless if it's not connected to ground). once the graphite paint in the neck holes is grounded, when the neck screws are inserted they would also be grounded, and so therefore would the neck plate. So if he had done the graphite job right, connecting the neck plate to the trem/spring claw should have made no difference.

But it did!

So perhaps the trem/spring claw wasn't correctly grounded, in which case the correctly grounded graphite in the neck holes fixed that problem once the neck was screwed on and the neck plate was connected to the spring claw.

BUT if the spring claw ground was faulty, you should have also had noise problems with the L3's humbucker. And Lukather's transition single coils are hum-cancelling. Your noise problems should not have been any worse than what you usually have with your humbuckers.

UNLESS the spring claw was only grounded when the humbucker was selected and I can't think of any good reason why that should have been. Did you buy the guitar new or used?

I think something else was wrong. I'm not sure what, but it has clearly been fixed!

 

[tristan klein]

I bought the guitar new, it came with that very noisy ground problem and the neck not adjusted...strings were not correctly set in front on the pickups...we tried to fix this but E strings were going out of the neck...so we kept it like that. ( minor issue to me )

It makes a lot of problems for a brand new €3000 guitar...but we don't have a customer service as good as yours in france ( it appears that it has the worst reputation in the business ), so I decided to deal with imperfections and fix things that could be fixed.

You're right about the ground noises, the problem was probably more complex and I don't have a subtil english enough to explain was the tech said...

This particular guitar made a lot of views on dunlop and bogner's facebook these last week, I loved it with the ground noise ( thans to my wireless ) and now it's just perfect...

More to come for dunlop again and two notes with " le crunch " preamp

Please note that this was not a critic of music man guitars. Just a tip to help people who could have the same problem. When I bought my ilive gold, my first reflex was to write to Scott via Linkedin to say how impressed I was...I think my signature truely expresses my touhgs about the guitars...

 

[DrKev]

It's all cool.

 

[tristan klein]

oh yes, it is

 

[Norrin Radd]

I read the whole thing and now I'm afraid to plug in my toaster.

 

[DrKev]

Mmmm, toast. Hot crunchy tones. Buttery, even.

 

[tristan klein]

i read the whole thing and now i'm afraid to plug in my toaster.

:d:d:d

 

[Patrick DiCicco]

Tristan ,Did they run a wire from the backplate to the claw? My L3 HSS is doing the same thing!

 

[tristan klein]

I think it's something like that. I'm not a tech and it's even more difficult to explain in english to me but basicly, they put a wire from the backplate under the neckjoint to the trem. ( that's what I understood )

 

[TripHazard]

We ought to have some of these threads as stickies - or a thread called "common problems and queries solved" - that way we we could build up a nice data bank of knowledge for oldies and newbies alike. And maybe even customer service would benefit from this being here.

 

[Spudmurphy]

Just wondering how you would run a second ground from the claw to the neckplate? - wouldn't that require some invasive "surgery" like drilling a hole in the body to get the additional ground from the claw to the neck plate screws?

 

[tristan klein]

Just wondering how you would run a second ground from the claw to the neckplate? - wouldn't that require some invasive "surgery" like drilling a hole in the body to get the additional ground from the claw to the neck plate screws?

I think they made something like that. You know, I'm not the tech guy, I'm so busy trying to play the guitar correctly, if I'd try to fix it by myself, the CS shoud probably open a division dedicated to my mistakes

I propose we close this thread, somebody submited the idea to post a sticky about this particular issue, my personnal advice would be " call CS first " ( if you're in US ).

 

[beej]

I agree.