Help with some active pickup questions - lots of noise, sort of.

D

dmacvicar

Apr 21, 2020
2
0
2,531
#1
Hey Bass folks!

I am a guitar player but bought a used bass for recording. It is a Bass : Stiletto Extreme-5. Guitar felt ok! - needed basic setup work. I didn't have a chance to plug in when buying, but it is what it is. I took it home and set it up in my own jam setup:

  • Line 6 Helix -> MacBook -> Yamaha HS7 speakers.
I noticed loading up certain bass patches that the noise was CRAZY when I actually played the strings - high pitched buzz. Reading online, everything pointed to a grounding issue (lack of bridge ground, maybe output jack wired wrong, etc) I literally spent the day re-soldering the jack, and going down the rabbit hole of the wiring. All thing said and done, the wiring seemed 100% correct.

At the end of the night I gave up and was tired trying to pinpoint the grounding issue. In one last attempt I plugged into a different Helix patch - this one didn't have the LA Studio Compressor in the patch and I was sitting in a particular direction and BAM - NO NOISE - almost virtually quiet. I did notice a super super slight noise when playing, but I chalked it up to just active pickups (it was no where near the same noise level I was deeming to be 'problematic')

So in summary - moving the bass around the room drastically changes the 'ground hum' sound when playing the strings - combine this with Helix patches with the studio compressor and it becomes almost unplayable. Un-do these things and the bass sounds amazing.

I am trying to determine if - that is an extreme situation - meaning, there is still likely grounding issues with the bass or, did I find the perfect cocktail of environmental noise in combination with active pickups & compressor settings.
 
#2
Welcome to the forum!

Aggressive compression will always make that problem worse. You’re making the softer sounds louder and the louder parts softer, so buzz that was tolerable before will now leap out at you.

Your Schecter has a battery, but that doesn’t mean that your pickups are active; it probably means you have passive pickups (the Schecter name on the pickups is another clue) going into an active tone circuit.

True active pickups (such as EMGs) are generally very quiet, but passive pickups can vary a great deal in their construction, and therefore in their noise rejection capabilities. A good shielding job can help, sometimes a lot. Or perhaps you can add a noise gate to your Helix patch?
 
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#3
So when recording what DI did you use? And what preamp did you use prior to the Line 6 Helix? If you used no DI then there's your issue right there! You always need a DI going into you interface coming from your guitar! When I record bass I do this(I also own and operate a recording studio, used to work back in the day at some of the bigger studios, so been doing the recording game for 20+yrs!),
1. Run bass into DI(Radial JDI is a good cheap DI that is used in pro studios around the world!)]
2. Run DI into preamp(API, SSL, NEVE, etc., whatever works, if you use a cheap preamp like Behringer or something, just don't bother, your better off not, TBH, get a Cloudlifter instead and boost the poopie out of it that way, then in your DAW use a standard Gain plugin to boost the gain, then write that boosted gain to the track and viola....that's the cheap way of doing it, I do not recommend doing it that way at all!
3. After Preamp go into compressor, if your gonna do that, I usually use a DBX 160, but a cheap DBX 160x works great as well! As long as it's in good working order! You can pick one up for a few hundred bucks, and they work on many things, including background vocals, and you can tame your vocals just a touch going in as well. They also work great on kick and toms, as well as certain percussion tracks, and guitar tracks. But compressor is not necessary, and many do not use them!

Basically must have's are #1, and if you have a really shaging great interface(like a UAD 8xp, Antelope, Apogee, Burl, Focusrite Red, etc.)with great internal preamps then you might not need a separate preamp, but I'd still use one!

dmacvicar said:
Hey Bass folks!

I am a guitar player but bought a used bass for recording. It is a Bass : Stiletto Extreme-5. Guitar felt ok! - needed basic setup work. I didn't have a chance to plug in when buying, but it is what it is. I took it home and set it up in my own jam setup:

  • Line 6 Helix -> MacBook -> Yamaha HS7 speakers.
I noticed loading up certain bass patches that the noise was CRAZY when I actually played the strings - high pitched buzz. Reading online, everything pointed to a grounding issue (lack of bridge ground, maybe output jack wired wrong, etc) I literally spent the day re-soldering the jack, and going down the rabbit hole of the wiring. All thing said and done, the wiring seemed 100% correct.

At the end of the night I gave up and was tired trying to pinpoint the grounding issue. In one last attempt I plugged into a different Helix patch - this one didn't have the LA Studio Compressor in the patch and I was sitting in a particular direction and BAM - NO NOISE - almost virtually quiet. I did notice a super super slight noise when playing, but I chalked it up to just active pickups (it was no where near the same noise level I was deeming to be 'problematic')

So in summary - moving the bass around the room drastically changes the 'ground hum' sound when playing the strings - combine this with Helix patches with the studio compressor and it becomes almost unplayable. Un-do these things and the bass sounds amazing.

I am trying to determine if - that is an extreme situation - meaning, there is still likely grounding issues with the bass or, did I find the perfect cocktail of environmental noise in combination with active pickups & compressor settings.
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