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Tackling Noisy Guitar Recordings

Clean Up Your Axe! By Paul White
Published February 2025

Tackling Noisy Guitar Recordings

Are buzzes, hums and hisses ruining your guitar recordings? Here’s how to keep the noise to a minimum.

For as long as we’ve had electric guitars, guitarists have had to grapple with unwanted noise making its way into the guitar sound. When playing electric guitar in live performance, hum, buzz, fizz and hiss are certainly not ideal, but you may still feel that a little of it is acceptable. But recorded performances will be heard over and over again, so such noises are likely to be much more irritating. This article takes you through the main causes of electric guitar noise, offers some solutions, and should also help you make the best of things and manage expectations in those situations where at least a little noise is inevitable.

Guitar MOT

A cheap multimeter allows you to check that there’s a zero‑resistance path between the guitar’s hardware and its output jack.A cheap multimeter allows you to check that there’s a zero‑resistance path between the guitar’s hardware and its output jack.Lots of clever plug‑ins attempt to address noise after the fact, but they can’t take care of everything and the more you ask them to do, the greater the side‑effects. In short, the best results always come from eliminating or minimising annoying noises before you record. There are several potential issues that can cause and exacerbate noise problems, and some are more obvious than others, but the best place to start is probably the guitar itself.

The first thing to check is that there’s a zero‑resistance path between the guitar’s hardware and its output jack. To check this, use a multimeter set to Ohms, plug in your regular guitar cable and measure the resistance between the strings and the barrel of the jack plug at the amp end of your lead. The meter should read very close to 0Ω. By the way, checking in this way rules out problems with the guitar lead, which is helpful — if there’s a problem, change the lead; if it goes away there’s your issue, if it doesn’t, the problem is with the guitar...

Usually, the guitar’s bridge is grounded, and this means that the strings are also grounded. Grounding is normally handled by a length of wire inside the guitar that, in the case of a Strat‑type guitar, links the vibrato spring claw to the ground wiring on the control panel. The backs of the pots are common termination points for ground wires, as there’s plenty of area for soldering and most wiring regimes will ground these parts, either using wires or via a metal‑foil lining to the pick guard, through which all the controls are fitted.

Even slight corrosion on the guitar’s jack could be the culprit — a quick squirt of Deoxit should address the problem.Even slight corrosion on the guitar’s jack could be the culprit — a quick squirt of Deoxit should address the problem.A less immediately obvious potential cause of poor grounding is something I experienced when playing a guitar with ‘noiseless’ pickups (stacked humbuckers that are designed to sound like single coils) at a noisier than usual live venue that had lighting dimmers. As you may know, these produce radio‑frequency emissions for which the pickups in your guitar act as antennae. My guitar wiring was all good, the noiseless pickups were Fender stacked humbuckers, and I had a really good guitar cable but I was still picking up a huge amount of interference. My amp was properly grounded too, so where was all that buzz coming from? The culprit turned out to be a slight layer of corrosion on the grounding prong of the guitar’s output jack. This added resistance to the ground path, which can be identified as outlined above. A quick clean and a spray of Deoxit D5 soon had me sorted.

To get the best from noiseless pickups, it’s also a good idea to screen the control cavity of the guitar using either conductive paint or self‑adhesive copper strip, all of which should be interconnected and linked to the guitar ground.

There are now some very good ‘noiseless’ pickups designed to look and sound like single‑coil types.There are now some very good ‘noiseless’ pickups designed to look and sound like single‑coil types.Another option is to fit active pickups. These tend to have a lower impedance, which makes them less susceptible to induced electromagnetic interference, and their active circuitry matches the pickups to your amp or audio interface. However, many players are wary of them, partly because they need power (typically from either a 9V battery or a USB chargeable lithium battery), and partly because they may not sound the same as the passive pickups to which they’re accustomed. Also, it’s often necessary to partly disassemble the guitar to change the battery if the pickups are a retrofit. So there are pros and cons, but they can be effective.

Location, Location

Shielding a guitar’s circuitry with copper tape can sometimes help, but not as much as you might hope — the hundreds of metres of copper in the pickups are more likely to be the source of your woes!Shielding a guitar’s circuitry with copper tape can sometimes help, but not as much as you might hope — the hundreds of metres of copper in the pickups are more likely to be the source of your woes!Although screening the inside of the guitar can help, if you don’t have active, traditional humbucking or noiseless pickups, it will probably make less difference than you hoped. Why? It’s simply because the half‑metre of unscreened wire linking your pickups to the controls is not the main problem: the real culprit is the several hundred metres of wire wrapped around the magnets inside your pickups, which has been configured in such a way as to respond to the smallest changes in magnetic field.

Single‑coil pickups...

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