Advice on reducing noise

[DJ Jazzy Death]

Hey everyone... it's been a while. How's everybody doing?

So I am hitting the studio this weekend and I've been getting some weird kind of "farty" noise when I play hard... I use a Sterling S/H.

I play in Drop D tuning but I've raised the strings with the truss rod, slightly lowered the Humbucker pick up, and am using Ernie Ball Regular Slinky strings and I'm still getting this noise when playing hard (and I'm not playing ridiculously hard, but as hard as I should be for the songs i'm playing). I thought it might be my cab but i'm getting it at low volumes too. I also changed the battery within the last couple of months but will be replacing it before I record just in case. Anybody else run into anything like this? Suggestions?

 

[Rick Auricchio]

Try a different speaker cabinet. It could be a damaged speaker.

 

[phatduckk]

try and pay attention to see if the string's hitting the pickups' pole pieces. that'll cause that sort of noise.

or - make the string hit the pole piece on purpose and see if thats the same noise.

My guess is you're hitting the pickup w/ the string

 

[DTG]

i had the same problem a while back,in my case it was the the speaker in the cab.its a while ago but i think i had the input gain too high.

 

[mynan]

I've noticed that when I play harder, sometimes my finger hits the string above the one I'm actually playing...if I'm playing on the D-string, my finger will sometimes hit the A-string, causing it to hit the fretboard and make noise.

 

[five7]

All of the above!

 

[DJ Jazzy Death]

try and pay attention to see if the string's hitting the pickups' pole pieces. that'll cause that sort of noise.

or - make the string hit the pole piece on purpose and see if thats the same noise.

My guess is you're hitting the pickup w/ the string

In that case, should I continue to lower the pickup more?

 

[DJ Jazzy Death]

Try a different speaker cabinet. It could be a damaged speaker.

Yeah, I'll be running direct through the board when I'm recording so that will determine if it's really all in the speaker. If that's the case, I'll have some readjusting to do! I'll reamp the tracks I record through the board to my rig so I hopefully get a nice tone... Basically, for better or worse I'll find out the source of the problem this weekend I suppose.

 

[mynan]

In that case, should I continue to lower the pickup more?

IMO, it's best to identify the cause of the problem and adjust your technique to resolve it rather than making extreme adjustments to your bass setup that could result in diminished tonal quality.

 

[DJ Jazzy Death]

So I'm back from the studio... it's unfortunately the bass and not the amp. It sounded like garbage actually. We ended up reamping it through my cab, still really noisy, but used it to an advantage. We tracked it through my cab, an Ampeg SVT 4-Pro, and used an Ampeg B-15 plug in. THEN we tracked it again with the same set up but used my Fulltone Fulldrive pedal for extra growl. We'll end up only using that tone for a couple of parts probably when it calls for it, but we'll see. It might make the full cut! When it sits in the mix it sounds pretty awesome. Reminds me of Rush sort of. I'll post links once it's been mixed and is online.

In the meantime though, for live stuff it's not going to cut it. I'm going to see if I can get it set up and hopefully that does the trick.