I hate my current flat for this reason. Regardless of guitar or cables, if I am at home and plug straight into my amp... I get a lot of noise. I mean a LOT. Basically unplayable.
Yet if I plug into my pedalboard and go through the entire chain, the noise is minimal and sounds within normal limits. So I just typically play through my pedals at home, and it's all fine. Here is my board:
The whole board, noise is silent. Just wah... noise is back. Just wah+tuner... noise is still there. Wah+tuner+OCD... noise is still there. Wah+tuner+OCD+phaser ... noise is there when the phaser is off, but not there when the phaser is on.
The leads me to believe it is some kind of buffering problem, because AFAIK all of these pedals prior to the Boss delays are true bypass. Pretty much all of my cables are from JohnnyShredFreak. These
ones. Patch leads are exactly the same cable, and the REAN jacks. I'm not sure what the cable is. But generally I don't have problems with them... as long as I use my whole chain.
It's annoying, because I often want to put my delays and reverbs into my JVM's loop... and as soon as I do that, and go into the amp from the phaser or just straight from the guitar... noise central, and it becomes unusable. This seems limited to home, I don't get it at the practice room.
Any ideas what the hell can be causing this, and what I should do to fix it? I thought maybe about switching to a TU-3 so I get a buffer at the start of my entire chain. Not sure if that will work, but I clearly have some room.
My Zoom MS-70 CDR should be here soon, but it doesn't have a looper built into it, so I will sometimes still want to use my Boss delays in the loop... so I really wanna solve this if I can.
Comments
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
It's the Joe Satriani JVM, so probably has the partially lifted ground like you say. I think I may replace the Polytune Mini with a TU-3 in this case. Just gives me another buffer to have in the chain for when I move my other pedals to the loop, and I don't use the polyphonic tuning anyway! I'd like to save space, so it seems like just replacing the tuner would be better than getting a dedicated buffer pedal.
Not sure what you mean by last instead of first - do you mean put the tuner as the last pedal in the chain before it hits the amp; ie.. after the reverb (or phaser when I am putting those other pedals in the loop) ??
@Digitalscream if you want to buy my Polytune mini, let me know
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
So I noticed tonight in the rehearsal room that if I plug into the amp directly, the sound is *very* muffled and *very* low-gain. But when I use my pedalboard it sounds fine - no muffling, and regular gain. This is regardless of cables or guitar.
I also noticed that my clean channel needs to be set absurdly loud - literally cranking the channel volume and the master volume. It doesn't sound "bad" as such, but it worries me that I need that much gain on the amp to even out the levels between clean and distortion.
Crucially, the distortion (when I am going through the buffers in my pedals) does not seem quiet or under-gained at all, but the clean channel does seem under-gained and quiet - even when everything is cranked. This has been like this (AFAIK) since I retubed around the 20th of July. But I've only just cottoned onto the problem.
I bought a matched quad of Winged C Svetlana tubes and a range of Golden Dragon ECC83T's, and a couple of EHX 12AX7's. I tried a variety of combinations of tubes in the day today, and they made no difference. The amp is biased to 63mV per-side, which is the same value it was set to from the factory.
In short - wtf is going on!?!
(
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
I got in touch with Marshall and they said to get it repaired under warranty it has to go back to the shop I bought it from. Suckage.
So it's going back to Marshall next week!
I'd get a new amp.
)
I spoke to Marshall and booked an appointment for the 19th. So gonna cart the amp there on the train! *gulp*