#147725  by flyingheelhook
 
Background: I modded my '82 Ibanez AR 305 with a Waldo buffer and upgraded Seymour Duncan pickups. Recently I also acquired a Kemper Profiling Amp. I've determined that my house is filled with electronic issues, mostly attributed to dimmers and the like, so I get a lot of EMF/RFI type noise. Mostly its a mild nuisance, but with the Kemper it really comes out more than with a tube amp - especially with headphones or when using high gain profiles. Last night I was playing around building a couple of performances (bank of five amp/amp settings) based on Michael Britt's Dumble and The Amp Factory Fender Twin amp profiles (building incremental amounts of gain and tweaking other settings) and I noticed that when I switched my pickup selectors to the Tapped (middle position), both pickups would pick up an excess amount of EFI/RFI noise compared to when they were in either the series or parallel positions. In regards to the guitar, originally I did go to some trouble to shield the cavities with both the paint and foil, and recently fixed a loose ground wire so I found this both annoying and a bit vexing.

So my question is, is the tapped position just prone to more noise or is there some other grounding/shielding I need to do? It doesn't show up as much at practice (someone else's house) or in gigs but i would like to eliminate the issue if possible. Any thoughts?

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 #147741  by mkaufman
 
Coil cut = single coil = noise.

There are techniques for reducing noise, including:

- shielding
- star grounding
- dummy coils & noise eliminating devices (which tend to use phase cancellation and affect tone)

In my journey, my only satisfying solution was to move.

YMMV.

mk