a social media cure for noisy pedals that actually works!

[dubkitty]

while scrolling my Facebook feed i came on a couple of different posts suggesting that if you have noisy pedals the problem may be that the pedal’s back plate and the edge of the enclosure are both coated in paint and thus the back plate isn’t grounded and actually serves as a RF antenna. i’ve seen a lot of horseshit about guitars, amps, and pedals over the years so naturally i was sceptical but decided to give it a test. the fact that one poster said he'd actually tested the back plate with a multimeter and found it wasn't grounded made it plausible.

there are three pedals i had to stop using on the FEB or try to isolate with buffers: the Demedash T-120 videotape delay, Chase Bliss/Cooper fx Generation Loss v2, and the Fjord Fuzz MIME v2 reverb. so i took my trusty cone-shaped Dremel bit and reamed out the screw recesses until they were bare metal. and fuck me if it didn’t work. all three pedals are far less noisy. the Gen Loss is dead quiet unless you use settings that add noise; the T-120 is quiet until i turn the Time past ~600-700 ms of delay where clock noise comes in, and the MIME, which is still a bit noisy, is far less so and the switch pops which were like cannon fire are reduced to a bearable level. i may still replace it, but it’s much more useable. getting this result with three pedals that are adjacent in the signal chain is particularly remarkable.

so if you have an obnoxiously noisy pedal, check the screw recesses, especially if the entire enclosure has been painted. i really didn’t expect this to work at all, but sure enough it really does.

[K2000]

This is a hot tip, thanks for sharing!

[dubkitty]

also going to try it on some other noisy pedals that i semi-retired, particularly the 3Xfx FATMAN OD which is the first pedal i ever bought after seeing it on ILF. great sound, terrible noise that apparently was noticeable enough that the demos faded between edits and you never heard the background noise level. after that i always check for that in demos and only trust folks who don't do that.

[K2000]

I have a few pedals I need to check, including a sweet BYOC vibrato clone that has a momentary switch. I had to pull it from my board because it was too noisy with certain other pedals. (I love momentary switches)