Idiotic question about silent circuit...

[whitestrat]

Please bear with me...

I read that the Silent Circuit is meant mainly to deal with 60 cycle hum right? Then what about when it's used in countries with non-60 cycle power supplys? Like Singapore for example, where we use 50 cycle instead.

Does that mean the Silent circuit becomes redundant?

Does the SS affect hiss and grounding noise as well?

Also, for a Silo Spec in HSS, is the humbucker (I know it's probably dumb, but I better ask cos I'm not that smart...) wired thru the circuit too?

 

[Colin]

it's 50 cycle here and we get no problems.

 

[Ripper]

My experience with the AL:

Silent circuit off (No battery)
Clean amp with no gain/distortion --> All position quiet/noiseless sound.
Dirty amp --> 1/3/5 position --> hum, 2/4 position --> auto hum cancelling.

Silent ciruit on (with battery)
Clean/Dirty amp --> 1/3/5 position --> IMPROVED noised reduction.

The silent circuit, in short, will tame the noise/hum of any single coil position.

 

[whitestrat]

it's 50 cycle here and we get no problems.

I know there probably will have no problems, but does this remove the usefulness of the SS? In the sense that we may not even need to use the battery?

 

[whitestrat]

Dirty amp --> 1/3/5 position --> hum

Jim, this is odd... My Fender Strat with Custom 69s single coils have NO hum when using a dirty channel on a vintage sounding amp (Overdrive).

You're saying your AL hums without the SS?

 

[Ripper]

^ Yup. Thats when I play with a dirty amp, and without a battery to activate the silent circuit, position 1/3/5 (single-coil only positions) hums. But when I play on a clean amp(well-grounded), any position is quiet. I think its natural for position 1/3/5 to hum, as in the same for the single coil and single coil+bridge positions of my Y2D...

 

[Brian G]

I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I believe that even with the battery out, the signal is still passing thru an inductor.

In late May or thereabouts, I'm going to try an experiment and have the SS taken out of the circuit on my Axis SS MM90's, to see if it makes a difference.

I'm going to do a pickup swap as well, but I'll only do one thing at a time, so I can form an opinion on the SS. No disrespect to the stock pickups, I just haven't found a stock production guitar that couldn't be improved by an electronics upgrade. And I just can't resist trying it out.

We'll see.

Brian

 

[beej]

The Silent Circuit has a small "dummy coil" inside and an op amp to buffer that coil's signal. The dummy coil picks up background noise regardless of what frequency it is. 50 Hz, 60 Hz, doesn't matter. This signal is then buffered internally and subtracted from you guitar's signal, so you hear less noise. It's generally only wired up to single coils or MM90s, there's no reason to have it wired up to a humbucker (unless it was particularly noisy, in which case you could actually do it.)

Brian- the inductor's signal is fed to an op-amp inside the little device. The output of this is then fed to the ground of the pickups. When you take the battery out, the output of the op-amp is effectively at ground so there is no contribution from the coil or the other circuitry in the Silent Circuit. So that effectively removes it from the circuit. You can try taking it out it to see. Or easy way to prove it is to actually ground the negative leads of the pickups (you could do this with alligator clips so as to avoid soldering).

I like these little guys so much I've actually put them in other guitars (including my Morse and Y2D).

 

[Ripper]

^Beej the man - very well explained, me learnt a lot here too.

 

[paranoid70]

Please bear with me...
Does the SS affect hiss and grounding noise as well?

Unfortunately, it does not affect grounding noise. My house is rather poorly grounded, and when I play with distortion and especially reverb, I tend to get significant grounding noise. The SS does not mitigate the grounding noise at all.

 

[lumberjack]

The Silent Circuit has a small "dummy coil" inside and an op amp to buffer that coil's signal. The dummy coil picks up background noise regardless of what frequency it is. 50 Hz, 60 Hz, doesn't matter. This signal is then buffered internally and subtracted from you guitar's signal, so you hear less noise. It's generally only wired up to single coils or MM90s, there's no reason to have it wired up to a humbucker (unless it was particularly noisy, in which case you could actually do it.)

Brian- the inductor's signal is fed to an op-amp inside the little device. The output of this is then fed to the ground of the pickups. When you take the battery out, the output of the op-amp is effectively at ground so there is no contribution from the coil or the other circuitry in the Silent Circuit. So that effectively removes it from the circuit. You can try taking it out it to see. Or easy way to prove it is to actually ground the negative leads of the pickups (you could do this with alligator clips so as to avoid soldering).

I like these little guys so much I've actually put them in other guitars (including my Morse and Y2D).

Hey Beej, are the silent circuits you put in your other guitars direct from Ernie Ball, or did you buy them after market somewhere else?

 

[beej]

After market, EBMM doesn't sell them separately, except as replacements. Craigslist, eBay and a helpful forumite who was done with his

If you have a trem, another option is the Suhr Backplate. That thing works phenomenally, though it's pricey. More of a loop antenna than a dummy coil and it's passive so no need to worry about a battery.

 

[58super]

Hey Beej,

Thanks for the explanation.

The AL middle pickup is reverse wound and attaches to separate lead of the silent circuit.

If you replace this pickup with non reverse wound pickup would you connect it to the same lead to the silent circuit as the other 2 pickups and adjust the trim pot on top for minimum hum or should it be connected to the original lead?

Thanks again.

Cheers,
David

 

[Brian G]

Beej - thanks for the in-depth explanation. It sounds like you've experimented with the SS in and out of circuit? If so, did you notice any affect on the highs with the SS in-circuit?

Thanks again for the enlightening comments.

Brian

 

[Ripper]

Beej - thanks for the in-depth explanation. It sounds like you've experimented with the SS in and out of circuit? If so, did you notice any affect on the highs with the SS in-circuit?

Thanks again for the enlightening comments.

Brian

Hey Brian, if I'm not wrong, Beej has done a silent circuit and piezo mod on his morse! Check out his pics..

 

[beej]

If you replace this pickup with non reverse wound pickup would you connect it to the same lead to the silent circuit as the other 2 pickups and adjust the trim pot on top for minimum hum or should it be connected to the original lead?

The SC has a regular output (blue) and an inverting output (voilet) for RWRP pickups. So yeah, if you replace the middle with a non RWRP pickup then just wire its ground to the blue.

Unfortunately there's just one trimpot so you can't tweak it for each pickup. You have to find the best balance that works for all three, or pick the one that matters most and aim to reduce it's hum. Sometimes it'll get them all, with other pickups it doesn't work as well.

Beej - thanks for the in-depth explanation. It sounds like you've experimented with the SS in and out of circuit? If so, did you notice any affect on the highs with the SS in-circuit?

Yeah, I've experimented both ways. To my ears there is no loss of fidelity, no missing highs from the signal. It's just about hum removal. Electronically it makes sense- from the SC you get a low impedance signal that doesn't load the pickups in any way. That keeps the character of their sound in tact. All it's doing is adding in inverted hum which gets removed from the signal.

There's been talk about people hearing a difference, but from what I can tell it's just the psychological effect of a quieter signal that people are reacting to. There's no real tonal change.

FYI, when I put them in my Morse/Y2D I wired them up for the singles and on a coil split. So when I split the HBs in the Morse they are pretty darn quiet

 

[58super]

The SC has a regular output (blue) and an inverting output (voilet) for RWRP pickups. So yeah, if you replace the middle with a non RWRP pickup then just wire its ground to the blue.

Unfortunately there's just one trimpot so you can't tweak it for each pickup. You have to find the best balance that works for all three, or pick the one that matters most and aim to reduce it's hum. Sometimes it'll get them all, with other pickups it doesn't work as well.


Thanks Beej.

I can get more quack and less hum!

David

 

[lumberjack]

After market, EBMM doesn't sell them separately, except as replacements. Craigslist, eBay and a helpful forumite who was done with his

If you have a trem, another option is the Suhr Backplate. That thing works phenomenally, though it's pricey. More of a loop antenna than a dummy coil and it's passive so no need to worry about a battery.

Cool! Thanks for the info.

 

[beej]

My pleasure!

 

[whitestrat]

The Silent Circuit has a small "dummy coil" inside and an op amp to buffer that coil's signal. The dummy coil picks up background noise regardless of what frequency it is. 50 Hz, 60 Hz, doesn't matter. This signal is then buffered internally and subtracted from you guitar's signal, so you hear less noise. It's generally only wired up to single coils or MM90s, there's no reason to have it wired up to a humbucker (unless it was particularly noisy, in which case you could actually do it.)

Thanks Beej! Explains a lot!

So, this means, that for a HSS Silo Spec, only the 2 Singles are connected, and I only have to tweak the switch to match the humbucker noise level?