I fitted an Ilitch Hum-Cancelling Back Plate

jaymenon

I've always loved hum-cancelling single coil pickups.

With Kinmans and DiMarzio areas each pickup on its own sounds beautiful. However the in-between positions lack the magic of genuine single coils.

Fitting the Ilitch was a bit of a faff but ultimately it was completely worth it...

I was originally under the mistaken impression that you require three pickups of identical wind and polarity.

There is actually however a diagram to use it with a middle pick up that is RW/RP - and it involves  a conventional five way switch (not a super-switch).

The beauty is that in the in-between positions, the coil is out of circuit. The two pickups hum-cancel each other - and so you get the proper Stratocaster quack - that beautiful sound so reminiscent of Mark Knopfler.

In positions 1, 3 & 5 the coil becomes active and it cancels hum beautifully, whilst retaining that pristine single coil sound.

I wonder if the fact that the coil is out of circuit in the in-between positions might be a good thing - because the coil is supposed to match the impedance of the pickups (5.5kΩ - 6.5kΩ). That impedence of course halves in the in-between positions to 3kΩ approx, and the coil will not match it perfectly - but with an RW/RP middle pickup the coil is of course out of circuit).

there again the coil was fundamentally designed to work with three pick ups of identical wind and polarity. and Ilitch knows what he’s doing...

...now all that remains is to tidy up those two wires in the tremolo cavity.

I managed to acquire both an Ilitch backplate and an Ilitch pickguard. Fitted the backplate, and now the pickguard is due to walk the classifieds plank...

Very very pleased - Will post some recordings ASAP.

https://i.imgur.com/rbRCals.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/W8ar7lr.jpg

Headphones

Blimey, that's not cheap!

axisus

I'm not a fan of the look at all. I prefer strats with the whole backplate removed, I've never kept them on any strat I owned. Having said that, if it serves a purpose that you require and can't be seen most of the time then it's maybe not so bad. 

Still wouldn't have one personally!

Seziertisch

I looked into getting one a few years ago for a hollowbody with P90s, it was prohibitively expensive. I costed getting a custom one together with postage and import duties and it was just too much. All in, it would have been close to EUR 500 by the time I got it.

They used to have an international dealer network, but that is no longer the case.

ICBM

Did you try the pickguard as well?

It's an interesting concept, certainly. I like the idea of wiring it with a RWRP middle pickup and switching it off in the 2 and 4 positions - although personally I'm not a fan of very 'quacky' Strat sounds - but from a look at the schematics they wire the tone controls to the neck and bridge pickups, not the middle - which I hate. That may be because the tone controls are not fully independent if they share the same cap, but you could do it with two separate ones.

Idle curiosity, really - I'm very happy with my Area 61 middle pickup and twin-rail mini-humbuckers in the neck and bridge...

jaymenon

Hi John, you can assign the tone controls any which way you want...

but since you are using only one side of the switch for the pickup signal wires and the output to the tone controls, two pickups cannot share the same tone control...!

west

Ive got one of the original Suhr /illitch bpsc it was on my tom anderson with 3 suhr v60lp's of the same polarity  it worked fantastically well whatever venue i played in ....  its just sitting in the draw now as ive got a different set up .. i keep meaning to pop it in the classifieds ... mmm

guitarmangler

I’d love one for my strat, but they are pricey. The Suhr backplate and their salient system is based off of the Ilitch one. Problem is, that something like this is the least ‘fun’ thing to spend money on, until you play in ‘that’ venue/festival/room where you’re single coil noise is as loud as your pickup!

ICBM

jaymenon said:

 since you are using only one side of the switch for the pickup signal wires and the output to the tone controls, two pickups cannot share the same tone control...!

Yes, you could still use one for the neck and one for the middle, but unless you use separate caps, when you've got both tones turned down then you have neck and middle pickups on together regardless of the selector switch. Whether that's of practical importance in most situations I don't know.

guitarmangler said:

Problem is, that something like this is the least ‘fun’ thing to spend money on, until you play in ‘that’ venue/festival/room where you’re single coil noise is as loud as your pickup!

Having played in a couple of such venues, that is exactly why I won't have any gigging guitar or bass without at least one hum-cancelling setting on it, and preferably on all settings.

Anyone who hasn't, and who thinks single-coil noise is just a minor inconvenience that you can't hear when you're actually playing, is probably in for an unwelcome wake-up at some point.

I know single-coils can sound great... but for me it's not a worthwhile trade-off for live playing. I now don't own a single instrument without hum-cancelling pickups, even though some of them look as if they have single coils.

west

Hope this is allowed , i put mine in the parts sales  if anyone is interested ...

jaymenon

Here’s a video. I might have to tweak the hum-cancelling pot on the Ilitch for the middle pickup just a tiny bit - but that is easily done.

https://youtu.be/3GYyHOkqUiY

jaymenon

One Interesting thing here is that I had previously screened comprehensively the pickup and control cavities in my Stratocaster with graphite/copper foil such that when I take my hands off the metal parts there is no buzz.

With the back plate based system - I do have a little bit of buzz when I take my hands off the strings in positions 1, 3 & 5, since there is now an externalised coil, outside the ‘faraday cage’ created by the screening. Not as much as an un-screened Guitar, but a little bit.  In positions 2 & 4 in which the coil is not active, when I take my hands off the strings there is no buzz.

I would imagine that with a pickguard based noise cancelling system this would not be a problem, since the aluminium foil on the pickguard would be anterior to (and outside) the Ilitch noise cancelling coil, which would therefore be enclosed within the Faraday cage...

The buzz is sufficiently mild, that it’s not worth the effort to fit the pickguard-based system that I also have (which is now in the classifieds here).

ICBM

jaymenon said:

I would imagine that with a pickguard based noise cancelling system this would not be a problem, since the aluminium foil on the pickguard would be anterior to (and outside) the Ilitch noise cancelling coil, which would therefore be enclosed within the Faraday cage...

Not if the coil is in the thickness of the pickguard itself - it will be outside the shielding foil.

What this does illustrate perfectly is the difference between noise that can be blocked with shielding and noise which needs a hum-cancelling coil to remove - even though with a lot of modern noise sources it's not as clear cut as 'buzz' and 'hum' used to be.

jaymenon

Indeed John - and it is very surprising to see people on forums who do not understand the difference between 50Hz hum and inductive buzz.

On a certain other forum there are people who advocate screening to counteract 50Hz hum on a Strat :-(

ICBM

jaymenon said:

On a certain other forum there are people who advocate screening to counteract 50Hz hum on a Strat :-(

It's not just forums - it's been misunderstood for at least as long as I've been working on guitars... nearly 35 years. It was written about extensively in books and magazines, and still wrong!

I had customers ask for their guitars to be shielded to stop them "buzzing", and then complain that the guitar still "buzzed" afterwards, which is a bit awkward when you're charging money for it - and have to explain that you did indeed do the job properly, but that they didn't understand that it wouldn't do what they expected - which was not their fault.

That's why I've always tried to be careful to use the terms hum and buzz separately - the problem now is that switch-mode power supply noise, which is common now but wasn't thirty years ago, sounds like 'buzz', when it is in fact 'hum', so it's even harder to explain the difference...

Seziertisch

ICBM said:

jaymenon said:

On a certain other forum there are people who advocate screening to counteract 50Hz hum on a Strat :-(

It's not just forums - it's been misunderstood for at least as long as I've been working on guitars... nearly 35 years. It was written about extensively in books and magazines, and still wrong!

I had customers ask for their guitars to be shielded to stop them "buzzing", and then complain that the guitar still "buzzed" afterwards, which is a bit awkward when you're charging money for it - and have to explain that you did indeed do the job properly, but that they didn't understand that it wouldn't do what they expected - which was not their fault.

That's why I've always tried to be careful to use the terms hum and buzz separately - the problem now is that switch-mode power supply noise, which is common now but wasn't thirty years ago, sounds like 'buzz', when it is in fact 'hum', so it's even harder to explain the difference...

I’ve had the opposite experience, installed noiseless single coils only to discover the pickups were only part of the problem.