Unwanted noise on new pickup install; need some help

GrooveHT

GrooveHT

New member
Hey Gents,
Because pictures get peoples' attention...

WP_20140214_002.jpg

Now, to business! I just did an electronics install on a new partscaster, here known as my LessPaul. The body and neck are mahogany, neck has a rosewood board, body has a thin maple top. Pickups are two Seth Lovers and a Classic Stack Plus middle. I grounded the bridge to the vol pot, everything else is as per SD diagrams. The Seths sound amazing when I can hear them through all the hum. This brings me to my problem. Played through my Axe Fx, there is a noticeable hum, with MORE hum when I touch the strings, bridge, or control plate. Usually when I've had a ground issue, making contact with one of those points makes the hum decrease, in this case it increases. Worse, when I roll off the volume pot even slightly, I get a substantial feedback-like buzz. I suspect that I may have "baked" the volume pot by making contact with the iron for too long.

Q#1: Are the symptoms consistent with a crapped-out pot?

Q#2: If not, any other suggestions as to what's producing the hum and buzz?

Side note: The Seths in series don't sound great with the Classic Stack plus. I did get 4-conductor Seths, but I think they may be too weak to use coil-split with a Classic Stack Plus. I can either find a super weak middle pickup, deal with the crummy 2 and 4 position sounds, or...well, I think I'm all out of ideas there. Or I can just leave the CS+ and put in a super switch just wired with the two humbuckers. Don't recommend series Seths in parallel with a single.
 
Re: Unwanted noise on new pickup install; need some help

You've very probably swapped hot and ground in your jack !!!.
 
Re: Unwanted noise on new pickup install; need some help

how does it sound now?
it looks good on paper, and that pic is sexy...
 
Re: Unwanted noise on new pickup install; need some help

Doc,
Neck and bridge positions are very, very LP ish, which is really what I was aiming for. Positions 2, 3, and 4 are sticking points for me. Had I had better foresight, I would have forecasted putting vintagey-output PAF types in the neck and bridge; the problem is, with vintagey PAFalikes, if you split them, they are weak and anemic. So, either they are anemic split, in combination with the middle pickup, or they are full buckers in series and dominate the middle when combined. What I SHOULD have done is made it an H/H body, installed Seths, and used the PRS DGT wiring, which as far as I know uses resistors to make the split coils sound much bigger; then I would have done a five way super switch using inner/both buckers in series/outer coils for positions 2/3/4.

Short short version, bridge and neck buckers sound awesome by themselves, need some work on the inner positions!

The neck is an USACG 24 3/4" mahog/rosewood, with an EBMM neck carve to it and I believe a 10" radius. It's perfect! I'm not sure that I would go with this bridge again vs. a hipshot hardtail or even the schaller-hannes or something; changing out the bridge humbucker means pulling the whole assembly off the guitar, which is a tremendous amount of butt-pain just to change a pickup. It sounds good though, so hard to argue with that, and these Seths are not going anywhere!
 
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