Noiseless P90

S

Sam SG

New member
So my LP Jr DC from my other post. Has a great sounding P90. BUT it is noisy and tonight at a gig it was horrible. I got pretty good at swiping the volume off and on but Holy it was bad in that place. Even my bucker guitars had a bit of hum tonight.
Anyways what is the most " TRUE P90" sounding noiseless out there?
Would shielding the whole cavity and underside of the pickup cover( and bonding it) help at all?
 
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Duncan makes some good ones. So does Lindy Fralin, and Trev Wilkinson offers a silent P-90 that sounds pretty good. I've used all 3.
 
IME, the most "true P90 noiseless" solution is... a true P90 + a large air coil in the Ilitch / Ulbrick fashion. It's easy to DIY and works well when properly built / installed but it's also cumbersome and therefore tricky to mount on/in a guitar.

Now, many noiseless P90's could and still can be found on the market. There were/are models with 3 coils (recent Duncan Silencer, DiMarzio "Fantom"), sidewinders with coils perpendiculars to pole pieces (Fralin, Mojotone, Lace), stacks (Gibson P100, older Duncan's, Kinman's)... The most recent designs should be a bit better, since they are attempts to solve the relative flaws of previous generations. Some of them still sound like humbuckers to me but subjective perceptions may vary.

As we're on the Duncan forum, I'd say to check the Duncan Silencer... ;-)

EDIT - Shielding is never useless but shielding the underside of the cover would introduce eddy currents possibly prone to change a wee bit the tone, BTW. And no, it wouldn't cancel the hum. Otherwise, humbuckers wouldn't have been invented. ;-)
 
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Cool I'll have to look into thr Silencer.
This guitar always hums when i bring it out obviously. BUT MAN....last night it was horrendous.
I used to have a gate on my board( we'll an EH hum debugger) but it sounded very weird so I removed it. BUT mistake taking the P90 out without any suppression
Freefrog...do you have any links or info on thst air coil setup. That sounds very interesting
 
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the volume is always off on my guitar when im not playing, its not even a conscious thing at this point. but there are some places that have horrible power, not much you can do there. even a good power conditioner only does so much so unless you travel with a kikusui
 
Out on the road, power can be unpredictable. P90s + dirty power = bad, bad noise.

My only noiseless P90s are Kent Armstrong Stealth 90s from about ten years ago.
They're pretty good, but a tad more polite than the real thing.
I bet the newer ones like Silencers are better than older noiseless models.
 
Fralins are the best in my experience... Sounds sacrilegious, but in the right guitar, it may even sound better than a standard p90.

But I think Freefrog has a good point on the Illitch approach and I'm glad he keeps reminding us...

I don't expect to be doing a lot more mods, but if I was, I would like to experiment with a cassette sized back plate to try to get a feeling for appropriate size and wind.

Also, It's funny how different guitarists respond to this issue.. from my experience, the home players, and to some degree studio guys, find workarounds.

The playing out guys also don't pay a lot of attention until it hits them and then it becomes a big issue.
 
im basically a live guy, with a little studio stuff on the side, and use single coils a lot. in the studio, i find i can always find a way to turn to minimize the hum. on stage, thats not as much of an option but i can almost always make it work.
 
zionstrat said:
But I think Freefrog has a good point on the Illitch approach and I'm glad he keeps reminding us...

I don't expect to be doing a lot more mods, but if I was, I would like to experiment with a cassette sized back plate to try to get a feeling for appropriate size and wind.
Click to expand...

Thx for the kind thoughts.

The last Ilitch inspired air coil that I've mounted with P90's was in a kind of plastic satellite measuring 20cm x 16cm x 1cm (6.9' x 7.9' x 0.4'). The guitar being a thin body double cut model, the added thickness didn't seem annoying: the big thick baseplate just fitted naturally between guitar body and player's belly. :-)

I wish I could find where I've put my notes about the exact recipe applied in this case to hand wind the coil... and I'm not sure that the guitar won't end routed some day in order to bury the air coil closer to the pickups.
All I can say is that it worked pretty well. Better than in previous experiments with similar coils. It's still directional: if the guitar is perpendicular to the amp and close to it, hum gets back. But with instrument and amp on parallel plans and at stage playing distance, it seems totally silent (except with B+N PU's, since pickups and air coil are no more balanced in this case).

The guitar had hosted an excellent noiseless P90 and a simpler dummy coil based on a P90 bobbin + LR components. The cumbersome Ilitch style backplate was judged efficient enough to stay instead, which might mean something... ;-)
 
jeremy said:
im basically a live guy, with a little studio stuff on the side, and use single coils a lot. in the studio, i find i can always find a way to turn to minimize the hum. on stage, thats not as much of an option but i can almost always make it work.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my live rig always has some bucking options but often I become fixated on the sounds in the middle..

Had a set of Joe bardin's in a strat with a spin a split which went everywhere from the thick fat barden sound down to a really spanky strat... Very very simple but not all that flexible.

We got a gig way outside of our normal geography and it was far enough I decided not to take a backup guitar, big big mistake.

Turns out the room must have been like a '70s disco because it had variable lights everywhere you could imagine. Backstage, lighting the sound booth you name it everything was variable.

That night I tried a thousand times to dial even slightly away from humbucking and it immediately sounded like my guitar had shorted out. I've never fought that much noise in my life.

Made it through the night with nothing even mildly strat sounding and started my search for my do everything noise rejecting guitar as soon as I got home;)
 
the rum boogie in memphis has this awesome old stax neon sign, right above the stage. if that thing is on, everything hums
 
I've toyed with the idea of putting a noiseless P90 in my SG Junior build but the Lollar I have in there now, and since I built it, sounds amazing. It's a custom wind to 10K with a tap for vintage output. Even talked with them on the phone about what I was after so this pickup is pretty special to me. Sure, it can get noisy but I honestly haven't had massive noise problems with it unless I'm running ridiculous amounts of gain. It sounds too good to swap out.
 
Yes exactly. In the studio with strat I've done the old find the spot and stand this certain way trick many times.
Live your stuck and usually it's deal able but sometines...ugh
 
It can certainly be a balancing act. In my rig, I tend to set a bit more gain but rarely have the volumes on 10, which is where the guitar is noisiest, so when I'm at 8-9 it's a good lead sound. Of course, when power sucks in a place, not much can be done, unless you're fancy like Angus or Brian May and can cart a Kikusui power unit around :D.

For other noiseless options, there's also the Fishman Fluence P90s: https://www.fishman.com/portfolio/fluence-p90-classic-pickups/. If you wanna hear them, listen to Greg Koch, he has a sig set. I don't know how they differ from the regular set, both have three voices - underwound, overwound and more traditional single coil thing.
 
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