Pickguard Shielding

Wow. I was going to post my bad on the decibel conversion, I was reading the charts and the Y axis didn't have the units labeled to differentiate, but other points I made based on the article are still valid. But it appears before I got back it devolved into a juvenile pissing match of 3rd graders on a playground. If it's no longer going to be a mature discussion, I guess there's no point typing any further. Good luck on your music career. I've already had several myself, I'm good.
 
All axes have the units labeled if you are talking about the article. But there was no constructive discussion on the last page anyway, so I don't mind, good luck.
 
Just shield your d*** guitar/pickguard and be done with it!
Or not.
A technical pissing match doesn't offer any realistic practical solutions that could possible help a gigging musician. Some of the "facts" may be perfectly valid in a theoretical sense and even undebatable, but maybe it would be better to just go with reasonably acceptable methods for making your guitar play as good as necessary and be content.
 
...and then you plug your 50-year-old, ungrounded amp into the outlet at the dive bar you're playing in, that's on the same circuit as the refrigerator...
 
Right or wrong, I used copper tape to shield every part of the pickguard that covers the routs. I'm betting that ther's nothing in my bedroom that will notice any change in resonant peaks or any noise that isn't mitigated.
 
Lazarus1140 said:
Right or wrong, I used copper tape to shield every part of the pickguard that covers the routs. I'm betting that ther's nothing in my bedroom that will notice any change in resonant peaks or any noise that isn't mitigated.
Click to expand...

I do this too.
 
htrd said:
6dB is twice the difference in the voltage. Twice. If it is the smallest increment that you can hear - well, I can understand why there is no difference for you (no offence meant) (:
Just noticeable difference for the majority of humans is 1dB. Well trained ears in the studio can notice even smaller, up to 0.3-0.5dB, but it depends on the acoustics and sound material, so it is a rare scenario.


Sigh. About a half of your pickup coil is exposed over the shielded stratocaster pickguard. As uOpt stated, you need to shield your wires, not the pickup itself.
Faraday cage model is relevant for the EMG pickups, that are fully covered in the conductive plastic, not for the classic stratocaster singlecoil.

So. Can I see the tests? Because my practical experience tells me that there is no difference in the noise because of 3 narrow cuts.
Click to expand...

This is not accurate. The plastic on an EMG is not shielding anything
 
I've seen several arguments made here that I find incorrect, but it's pretty clear people have their opinions and have dug in their heels, so I won't bother. Except to say that plastic doesn't conduct electricity.
 
misterwhizzy said:
I've seen several arguments made here that I find incorrect, but it's pretty clear people have their opinions and have dug in their heels, so I won't bother. Except to say that plastic doesn't conduct electricity.
Click to expand...

Who made a comment on plastic?
 
misterwhizzy said:
I've seen several arguments made here that I find incorrect, but it's pretty clear people have their opinions and have dug in their heels, so I won't bother. Except to say that plastic doesn't conduct electricity.
Click to expand...

Life's too short to change your opinion just because new information has proven it to be wrong. Not that EE is an opinion...
 
I may be wrong but I understand what htrd said as a reference to some plastic foil with conductive coating...

...and I tend to agree with what has been said above about eddy currents.

One can certainly discuss about the question to know is they can be heard or not... but I've a hard time to understand why such a discussion should be polemical: if people think to notice Foucault currents or if they don't detect them, no harm no foul, AFAIK. :-)


Footnote - In the early 80's, my first Strat copy received a DIY brass pickguard. To make the guitar sound right with my very first set of SSL1's, I had to mod the original phase switch and use it to enable/disable a master tone control for all pickups. It would take me two decades to understand that my tone was naturally damped by eddy currents due to the pickguard. :-P
That said, one of my friends still owns this instrument and doesn't notice anything wrong with it: the instrument as a whole is tonally right thanks to the higher resistive load of pot(s) compensating the side effects of magnetism. ;-)
 
freefrog said:
a DIY brass pickguard
Click to expand...

Ouch. Thick?
Anyway, that shouldn't be necessarily bad. I prefer 14ft cable instead of 10ft for my SSLs, because it shifts the resonant peak slightly lower, which nicely couples with the overdriven 5F6A. But I prefer to make such decisions controllable.
 
htrd said:
Ouch. Thick?
Anyway, that shouldn't be necessarily bad. I prefer 14ft cable instead of 10ft for my SSLs, because it shifts the resonant peak slightly lower, which nicely couples with the overdriven 5F6A. But I prefer to make such decisions controllable.
Click to expand...

Yeah, a few mm thick. :-)
I made the decision controllable by changing the resistive load of the circuit... but without knowing why yet. :-P
I was also using coily or long thick colored cables whose high capacitance would be understood by my thick brain a few years later, albeit their tonal influence was absolutely clear to my ears. :D
 
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