How are you guys going about reducing noise on sustained notes w/ single coils?

The Raven

The Raven

Inspired
I understand this is a very loaded question, but I'm trying to record a Strat style guitar with true single coils with some gain for my next song/video and I'm having a hard time dialing things in to keep the noise floor lower than sustained notes. Dialing in the noise gate to keep things in check when not playing is fine, but the moment I want to hold a note for a second or two, the noise tends to creep up and get louder than the actual note.

For some additional context, I am in an older house and this room (my bedroom) is filled with all manner of electronics that I'm sure are the reason behind the noise getting as bad as it does. Since I can't move rooms, I was wondering what sorts of things you guys are doing in the box to combat this or if I should just rely on something like Izotope RX for some post production noise-reduction stuff. I just worry about the impact on tones from using noise reduction after the fact and was curious if you guys have a more clever solution.

Additionally, swapping pickups isn't really a solution for this particular project, as I'm making a demo of this guitar as it is. Going forward I'd like to own a guitar with something like the Fishman Fluence pickups for recording, but I'd like to figure out how best to handle it for situations such as this.

Any guidance would be appreciated. I'm still new to recording my own music and I've been a humbucker guy forever, so I don't have much experience dealing with the joys of single coil noise.

Thanks in advance.
 
Intelligent mode of the input gate works pretty well with my strat, unless you turn the guitar way down, or play super super quietly. You don't end up with anywhere near the dynamic range you'd have without the gate, but the more gain there is, the less dynamic range you have anyway.

Shielding the guitar is an option, but some folks think it hurts your tone, and it sounds like you don't want to mod the guitar.
 
Move all around the room and turn in all different directions. You'll likely find a spot where the noise is quieter. Might feel a bit weird to end up cutting a track facing a random corner in the room, but it sometimes can help a lot. Beyond that, turn off as much other nearby stuff as possible. Computer screens can be a big culprit. You can try turning them off while you track and use keyboard shortcuts to control the DAW.
 
mr_fender said:
Move all around the room and turn in all different directions. You'll likely find a spot where the noise is quieter. Might feel a bit weird to end up cutting a track facing a random corner in the room, but it sometimes can help a lot. Beyond that, turn off as much other nearby stuff as possible. Computer screens can be a big culprit. You can try turning them off while you track and use keyboard shortcuts to control the DAW.
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+1000 there, Leo. As a Really Old engineer I’ve NEVER had a single opportunity to insist that a client change the pickups in their ‘57 Strat to something “quieter” — nor would I. Also happens I have a REALLY long story (for another time, perhaps) about this very thing. As Mr. F says: find your guitars’ “quiet place” and take it from there. And keep in mind nobody will hear the noise in the final context of a finished track with drums/keys/vox/etc.
 
Dave Merrill said:
Intelligent mode of the input gate works pretty well with my strat, unless you turn the guitar way down, or play super super quietly. You don't end up with anywhere near the dynamic range you'd have without the gate, but the more gain there is, the less dynamic range you have anyway.

Shielding the guitar is an option, but some folks think it hurts your tone, and it sounds like you don't want to mod the guitar.
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Yeah I don’t mind opening the guitar to shield it, but I’m pretty confident it already has some degree of shielding as it is a schecter custom shop guitar. I just wanted to try to keep it stock for the purposes of this demo, as well as helping give me practice getting around this just in case I borrow a guitar without shielding/noise cancelling pickups.

mr_fender said:
Move all around the room and turn in all different directions. You'll likely find a spot where the noise is quieter. Might feel a bit weird to end up cutting a track facing a random corner in the room, but it sometimes can help a lot. Beyond that, turn off as much other nearby stuff as possible. Computer screens can be a big culprit. You can try turning them off while you track and use keyboard shortcuts to control the DAW.
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I’ll try this too. Already tried spinning the chair around but unfortunately it didn’t do enough so I likely will end up in a corner or something. Filming is going to be a nightmare just because I’m sur the lights will exacerbate things.
 
touch33 said:
+1000 there, Leo. As a Really Old engineer I’ve NEVER had a single opportunity to insist that a client change the pickups in their ‘57 Strat to something “quieter” — nor would I. Also happens I have a REALLY long story (for another time, perhaps) about this very thing. As Mr. F says: find your guitars’ “quiet place” and take it from there. And keep in mind nobody will hear the noise in the final context of a finished track with drums/keys/vox/etc.
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The issue is this particular part of the track is actually just piano and guitar, because apparently, I like to make things hard for myself lol. Also, there’s unfortunately not an experienced mix engineer handling this, only me, and I have no clue how to go about hiding it myself yet. Thanks for the pointers. Time to throw on a strap and find the quiet zone pending any other suggestions. Fortunately I picked up RX for a good price a while ago so I guess I can try that too if all else fails.
 
Hi @The Raven ,

If you have light dimmers in that room, turn them full on (or off) and see if the noise changes.
Thanks
Pauly
The Raven said:
I understand this is a very loaded question, but I'm trying to record a Strat style guitar with true single coils with some gain for my next song/video and I'm having a hard time dialing things in to keep the noise floor lower than sustained notes. Dialing in the noise gate to keep things in check when not playing is fine, but the moment I want to hold a note for a second or two, the noise tends to creep up and get louder than the actual note.

For some additional context, I am in an older house and this room (my bedroom) is filled with all manner of electronics that I'm sure are the reason behind the noise getting as bad as it does. Since I can't move rooms, I was wondering what sorts of things you guys are doing in the box to combat this or if I should just rely on something like Izotope RX for some post production noise-reduction stuff. I just worry about the impact on tones from using noise reduction after the fact and was curious if you guys have a more clever solution.

Additionally, swapping pickups isn't really a solution for this particular project, as I'm making a demo of this guitar as it is. Going forward I'd like to own a guitar with something like the Fishman Fluence pickups for recording, but I'd like to figure out how best to handle it for situations such as this.

Any guidance would be appreciated. I'm still new to recording my own music and I've been a humbucker guy forever, so I don't have much experience dealing with the joys of single coil noise.

Thanks in advance.
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I've had okay results with my Strat in an extremely electrically noisy room. My Strat pickups are single coil and not noiseless design.

I find I get more playable results using the noise reducer mode on the In 1 gate, and being fairly aggressive with the settings. Intelligent can get too choppy for me when it's set with a high threshold using noisy single coils.

Settings - Mode: Noise reducer, Threshold: -55 to -50, Ratio: 3'ish, Attack: ~2ms, Release: 20-25ms

Another thing I'll do is turn the volume and tone knobs down like .5 (to 9.5) each. You can hear the noise drop a bit when they load down the circuit. And lastly as has been said do the spin and juke till you find the best spot.

If I get super desperate I'll throw a second gate in front of the amp sidechained to the input. That way you get the noise reducer and a hard chop at the level of the noise floor when you stop playing.
 
The Raven said:
I understand this is a very loaded question, but I'm trying to record a Strat style guitar with true single coils with some gain for my next song/video and I'm having a hard time dialing things in to keep the noise floor lower than sustained notes. Dialing in the noise gate to keep things in check when not playing is fine, but the moment I want to hold a note for a second or two, the noise tends to creep up and get louder than the actual note.

For some additional context, I am in an older house and this room (my bedroom) is filled with all manner of electronics that I'm sure are the reason behind the noise getting as bad as it does. Since I can't move rooms, I was wondering what sorts of things you guys are doing in the box to combat this or if I should just rely on something like Izotope RX for some post production noise-reduction stuff. I just worry about the impact on tones from using noise reduction after the fact and was curious if you guys have a more clever solution.

Additionally, swapping pickups isn't really a solution for this particular project, as I'm making a demo of this guitar as it is. Going forward I'd like to own a guitar with something like the Fishman Fluence pickups for recording, but I'd like to figure out how best to handle it for situations such as this.

Any guidance would be appreciated. I'm still new to recording my own music and I've been a humbucker guy forever, so I don't have much experience dealing with the joys of single coil noise.

Thanks in advance.
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Try moving/rotating your playing position with the guitar and see if there are any quiet spots. Single coils are somewhat like a figure-8 mic for electrical interference, so unless you are surrounded by it on all sides, there is usually a less noisy direction you can point them....
 
If you use so much distortion on single-coils that the noise floor exceeds the signal you want to use on sustained notes you can imo even use stacked single-coils (noiseless, i. e. DiMarzio Area, Fender Noiselss or any other you like) without a loss in sound. If the (very rare) need for such a guitar sound occurs here in the studio I do exact this way for years. My preferred pickup for this case is the Fender noiseless N3 strat set. For clean or light driven tones I wouldn't do so to keep the "true" single-coil sound alife. Here I use the Input-Block gate which works fantastic.
 
Any chance you can split jump to a 2 or 4 position to combat the hum for this spot?

At the very worst, the only people who will really bat an eye at some single coil hum are those with no experience dealing with single coil hum, unless it’s more noise than usual. Everyone else who has picked up a single coil guitar and plugged it in will know the deal already.

It’s not only single coil guitars that deal with this in the Axe, I made a post a few months back about doing light palm mutes with heavy distortion (chugging and letting it ring) results on the same thing; you’ll hear a hiss come in, like you would with a real amp once the guitar starts dropping below the noise floor. There’s no way to adjust the gate to combat it because the gate is listening for when you’re not playing, not as the notes are trailing.

Have you already tracked it and are having an issue now that it’s tracked, or are you trying to get ahead of it?

If you haven’t tracked it yet, do it up and see how it sounds. Drench some reverb on the piano and hope it covers up the guitar! :D
 
RevDrucifer said:
Any chance you can split jump to a 2 or 4 position to combat the hum for this spot?

At the very worst, the only people who will really bat an eye at some single coil hum are those with no experience dealing with single coil hum, unless it’s more noise than usual. Everyone else who has picked up a single coil guitar and plugged it in will know the deal already.

It’s not only single coil guitars that deal with this in the Axe, I made a post a few months back about doing light palm mutes with heavy distortion (chugging and letting it ring) results on the same thing; you’ll hear a hiss come in, like you would with a real amp once the guitar starts dropping below the noise floor. There’s no way to adjust the gate to combat it because the gate is listening for when you’re not playing, not as the notes are trailing.

Have you already tracked it and are having an issue now that it’s tracked, or are you trying to get ahead of it?

If you haven’t tracked it yet, do it up and see how it sounds. Drench some reverb on the piano and hope it covers up the guitar! :D
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Mostly just trying to get ahead of it. Was dialing in sounds and noticed the noise was pretty high on the longer held notes. I’m recording myself so i can track it as many times as i need to so long as my strings last. Thankfully positions 2 and 4 are hum cancelling since the middle is rwrp, but I really like the sound of this guitar’s neck pickup so i wanted to use it for some leads without things getting out of hand.

I’ve had some noise with humbucker equipped guitars ever since I moved into this house, but so far it hasn’t been unmanageable. I sold off all my amps before moving, but I figured it wouldn’t be an issue exclusive to the Axe Fx. Thankfully we have all these bells and whistles in the box so I was just curious if there was some golden settings for the noise gate or something i could tweak to help reign it in a bit.

I’m not using ungodly amounts of gain or anything egregious. I think its just a combo of having to have wireless extenders, tv relays, and whatever else in my room given where its at in the house.
 
RevDrucifer said:
Any chance you can split jump to a 2 or 4 position to combat the hum for this spot?

At the very worst, the only people who will really bat an eye at some single coil hum are those with no experience dealing with single coil hum, unless it’s more noise than usual. Everyone else who has picked up a single coil guitar and plugged it in will know the deal already.

It’s not only single coil guitars that deal with this in the Axe, I made a post a few months back about doing light palm mutes with heavy distortion (chugging and letting it ring) results on the same thing; you’ll hear a hiss come in, like you would with a real amp once the guitar starts dropping below the noise floor. There’s no way to adjust the gate to combat it because the gate is listening for when you’re not playing, not as the notes are trailing.

Have you already tracked it and are having an issue now that it’s tracked, or are you trying to get ahead of it?

If you haven’t tracked it yet, do it up and see how it sounds. Drench some reverb on the piano and hope it covers up the guitar! :D
Click to expand...
Noise being picked up on single-coils was the reason why Clapton spent so much time on his 2 and 4 positions in his first solo album if I remember right. It cemented that sound in my head and I still love it.

Those positions are great with a high-gain sound, whether it's from a pedal or a cranked amp. I love doing that with the lead channel on my Toneking Imperial, just turn it up and let it sing.
 
Gotta say, the high interference from my EJ bums me out, especially when I'm near the computer. Not hum so much, it's high buzz.

None of the noiseless pickup strats I've played flipped my beanie. I've never tried Fluences, but I'm betting they don't really sound like a strat (though I would like that second thicker tone). Maybe Kinmans.

But part of me doesn't want to do anything major to it. Why start with semi-high-end guitar if you're going replace stuff?
 
Greg Ferguson said:
Noise being picked up on single-coils was the reason why Clapton spent so much time on his 2 and 4 positions in his first solo album if I remember right. It cemented that sound in my head and I still love it.

Those positions are great with a high-gain sound, whether it's from a pedal or a cranked amp. I love doing that with the lead channel on my Toneking Imperial, just turn it up and let it sing.
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Yeah, it was something I did to get around that and the way-too-thin bridge pickup sound of my MIM Strat when I was a teenager. My first thoughts about my own tone were entirely based around that ratty bridge pickup and all the buzz. I ended up rolling the tone knob all the way down and using the bridge/middle for everything back then. I remember saying to my dad, “Eric Johnson sounds like 1000 grit sandpaper and I sound like 60 grit sandpaper.”
 
Hijacking to ask if y'all find that active pickup rigs do better with RF and other crap at gigs.

There are rooms that murder me with buzzzz even with humbuckers. Copper tape and all.
 
If you're certain the noise is from EMI/RFI and not bad power in your house (if on a clean preset the noise significantly decreases when you roll down your guitar volume knob), then this will help you: https://www.ilitchelectronics.com/product/bpncs-fender-stratocaster/

This is apparently the same type of dummy coil circuit that comes with Suhr guitars. My Suhr strat is dead quiet in all environments because of the dummy coil thing. It's fantastic.

Shielding the cavities with copper tape or conductive shielding paint can also help with EMI/RFI.

If you have bad power in your house then a good sine wave UPS is a good idea as well, you can get a good one on amazon in the US for a couple hundred bucks.
 
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