I have a question today that possibly crosses to another website, but i'm interested in your expertise here. It's more or less about music, but also about noise and electric current.
Basically, I have a band, we rehearse in an old garage, where there is no earth connection and the house attached to the garage is about 50 meters away (straight line, not counting the curves and other implications for connecting a wire there.), which makes it a lot of cable to buy, adding to the cable we will already have to buy in order to connect all the outlets… (we're on a 20 yr old student budget here…).
My grandfather told me once he has a copper tube around that he used to ground an irrigation pump motor. He just sticked the tube in the ground near the motor and it would eliminate the chance of getting him electrocuted when he had to touch the motor.
My question is, could this work for eliminating the hum and noise we get on our instruments? It gets awfully noisy in there with 2 guitars connected.
It would come out cheap because we don't need to get the copper tube, my grandfather told me we can take his as he no longer needs it.
Is it feasible? Would it work? How can I do it?
Best Answer
Good old Gibson invented the humbucker pickup in the 1950s but you guys are probably using Fenders that don't tend to use them. Even if you are using humbuckers, if you have a load of distortion effects even the slightest bit of hum gets really loud - I'm assuming that when you play a chord or lead the hum tends to become subdued and only really gets annoying when you are not playing anything.
If this is the case then the real problem isn't the lack of an earth rather, it's the poor wiring in the garage - if the two AC wires don't get routed toghter around the AC sockets there is a magnetic loop formed that is quite capable of rendering your set up really noisy. In my opinion this is the culprit and a good rewire of the garage may be in order.
If the symptoms I've described above don't tally with your experience let me know.