overdrive/distortion pedal noise

[Gunn_Slinger]

Hi guys
I have a number of overdrive/distortion stomp box pedals (boss,digitech,etc ).
All of them have hum, lots of it at high gain.
"people" have told me thats normal; i dont understand.
In this day of super technology, why cant these pedals be made without the hum?. I have a korg ax3000g that is super quiet using the NR fuction so i kanow it can be done.
Does anyone have anything that will do the job? I have an mxr noise gate and a boss noise suppressor that erode the signal when engaged.
"confused"---lol
thanks
Clay
P.S.
any good ways to cut the hum on old single coil tele?

[Mark Hammer]

1) ALL distortion pedals achieve their goals by amplifying the incoming signal considerably. If the incoming signal has some hum in it, the pedal generally does not distinguish and applies the same amplification to it as everything else. The only exceptions to this rule that I can think of are the Tube Screamer and its variations (which achieve their tone by chopping off much of the bass prior to amplification and clipping), and the MXR Distortion+/DOD250/YGM308 which trim the bass as the gain is increased. It"s a bit like looking into a magnifying mirror and wondering why it makes the zit on one's chin so big. Well, if there was no zit there'd be nothing to magnify. If there was no hum coming in, the pedal wouldn't make it louder.

2) The Korg is a digital pedal. Noise reduction under those circumstances is fundamentally different than an analog distortion pedal and a noise gate.

3) Most people have little or no idea how to use noise gates and suppressors. Ideally, a gate should be stuck as close to the front of your pedal chain as possible, so that you can set it with a very low turn-on threshold to tackle the hum before it gets amplified. the noise suppressor is best for dealing with hiss, and should be at the end of your pedal chain. BVirtually all pedals, and certainly those which apply gain, will produce some hiss. That hiss accumulates across pedals. If the gate at the front end keeps the hiss out so that it doesn't get amplified, then the hiss contributed by the pedals after the gate will be modest and the suppressor can be set for a low turn-on threshold as well, making it much less obtrusive.

[Brad1]

As Mark Hammer said, but to clarify a couple of things...

The gate works for noise present before the gate to keep it out while the guitar is not being played. Any noise present before the gate will still be present in the signal when the gate opens, but hopefully, the signal is much louder than the noise, so the noise will be less objectionable. The lower the initial noise, the better.

Any pedal in the chain may add more noise. Any pedal that boosts the signal will boost any previous noise, as well as any self-noise, as already stated. You wouldn't want to put a suppressor after a reverb or delay pedal (those should normally go last), as it will possibly start chopping off the tails in a stutter. One could probably be placed after other time-based effects like a flanger, phaser, chorus, etc., because the delays are much shorter together and not held out/repeated.

So, if the noise is coming from the pickups, then a gate may be handy in parts where the guitar isn't playing. If the pickups aren't generating objectionable noise, but a distortion-type pedal is, then a gate before the pedal may not do much good, and one directly after may start chopping the ends of sustained notes/chords as they fade. A properly set suppressor, after the distortion, chorus, etc...and before delay/reverb...maybe something like a HUSH...may possibly be set to gently lower the tail end of notes, and have less hiss/noise repaeated through delay/reverb, but that may also depend somewhat on the type of music you play, the severity of the noise, etc.

(Do I have all this right??)

Anyway, you may even try less reliance on super-high-gain indistinguishable bumblebee buzz, and try less distortion to listen to some actual guitar tone, and see if that doesn't sound more pleasing and less noisy?

Brad1

[Steve Conner]

In this day of super technology, why cant these pedals be made without the hum?. I have a korg ax3000g that is super quiet using the NR fuction so i kanow it can be done.

They can be made without the hum: That's what the AX3000G is.

The old "classic" analog distortion pedals can't be made without the hum, because if you put a high-tech digital noise suppressor in them, they wouldn't be the old classic pedals any more, and guitarists wouldn't buy them. (they are such a conservative bunch )

I've tried all sorts of noise gates etc. in my 20-odd years of playing, but my final solution was to use less gain, and turn the volume on the guitar down between songs.

[Chuck H]

Yup. Sure they can make a quiet distortion pedal. And they do. They're digital models of distortion tones without the amplifiers to do the job, ergo no amplifying of the noise already present in the system. They sound different IMHE. Not to mention the wierd glitchy encoding errors that make the harmonics sound, well, synthisized and artificial. I've heard them used to good effect on stage and thought 'Well, OK, not sooo bad.' and then another guitarist with a real tube amp and a RAT box steps up and just blows it away in spades. It's like the difference between orange "juice" and orange "drink". You know what the orange "juice" is and can immediately recognize the distinct balance of properties on your pallet. With the orange "drink" the best you can usually say about it is that it implies orange juice.

[CJCox]

Hi guys
I have a number of overdrive/distortion stomp box pedals (boss,digitech,etc ).
All of them have hum, lots of it at high gain.

Depending on what Boss pedal you are talking about I may have a mod or two that would help control some of the noise.

[thendrix]

and then another guitarist with a real tube amp and a RAT box steps up and just blows it away in spades.

Agreed!!! Glad to see I am not the only one. To each their own but I can't stand a digital guitar sound. I tried it, and I mean whole hearted, but it just doesn't seem to have the balls (for lack of a better word) that analog pedals and tubes have.

[melvin]

I would think that good shielding within the tele would go a long way to reducing the hum. Also, make sure the ground is good, the strings are grounded and you have good cables. I have also always thought using battery power in the pedals was less noise-prone. Furthermore, there's always "low-noise" single coils, although I have no experience with them.

[Mark Hammer]

Agreed!!! Glad to see I am not the only one. To each their own but I can't stand a digital guitar sound. I tried it, and I mean whole hearted, but it just doesn't seem to have the balls (for lack of a better word) that analog pedals and tubes have.

Distortion continues to be the biggest challenge to digital processors, largely because the properties of what tubes or transistors do when faced with sudden transients followed by finger vibrato, or chords on wound strings vs single notes on unwound strongs fretted high up, are EXTREMELY complicated to depict and translate into algorithms, compared to most other categories of effects, and demand copious amounts of processing power, compared to other things.

I would unhesitatingly place my confidence in digital reverbs, delays or other time-based types of effects emulated digitally, digital phasers, wah, autowah, cab simulation, tremolo, EQ, compression, etc., but for the time being, at any rate, most distortion is done better by analog pedals. That last frontier is not insurmountable, but its a tall peak to climb.

[Robert M. Martinelli]

I have always tried to stay away from noise gates, because I've always found they tend to kill (or at least spoil) my playing dynamics, and, having always preferred analog distortion pedals, I have always tended to kick hum out of the door where this should be done IMHO, that is, at the beginning of the chain. Good guitar/pickups shielding, good quality cables. Hating hiss the same way I hate hum, I always use "premium quality" components in my builds. I still use a MXR D+ clone and a TS clone I both built and modified to suit my needs time ago, I used an OP27 in the first, and a 5532 in the latter (plus metal film resistors everywhere), and they deliver what I want, less the higher level of hiss of the originals. This has always allowed me to stay clear of noise gates, with the obvious exception of studio recording sessions.

Cheers

Bob

[Chuck H]

FWIW I've never been in a recording studio that didn't have to (or even know you have to) buss in the guitar track right on cue to avoid the noise inherent with overdriven guitars. Any studio that complains about overdriven guitar amp noise simply doesn't have proper experience working with them. It's an issue that has been on the table since the dawn of rock and roll. Do you think that Jimmy Page or Kieth Richards had really quiet over driven tube amps? Yet in many recordings you don't notice objectionable amp noise.!. Hmmm...

[Robert M. Martinelli]

Well Chuck, the one I mentioned was a live-studio session, and all I can tell is that my rig had a very low noise/hum level that was (and is) perfectly acceptable to my ears, still the studio engineer complained about that, and put in a (slight) noise gate; as I said we're talking about recording (live-studio) a demo many years ago, in a studio that was neither "big" nor "well known", my studio experience was (is) limited, so I didn't question what the studio engineer said; maybe he was just tired and he didn't want to pay attention to what we were playing and didn't want to use the "mute" button too often in a live-studio situation (Back then we didn't have enough money to allow us to record the tracks one by one ).

I agree that in a "normal" studio session the wise use of the "cue" function keeps out most of the noise from appearing in the "finished product".

Cheers

Bob

[Steve Conner]

With the orange "drink" the best you can usually say about it is that it implies orange juice.

+1. There are actually real mathematically provable reasons why analog distortion sounds better. Line6 et al. keep quiet about them for obvious reasons. I'd love to hear a really high-end processor like the Fractal Axe thing, to see if it does any better, because the theory says that just throwing more CPU power at the problem will help a lot. Those "glitchy encoding errors" - better known as aliasing - are minimized by using a higher sample rate.

Also, analog distortion pedals are noisy, but I think digital distortion boxes might even work better if they were noisier. When you program a lot of gain in the digital domain, every time you amplify by a factor of 2, you lose one bit of your input signal. That was why the old digital distortion algorithms were so bad. If you started with 16 bits and then went through an algorithm with a gain of 1000, then if you rolled back your volume or played softly to get a clean tone, you would only be playing through 6 bits. Adding analog noise would help to dither that.

Now we have 24-bit audio ADCs the problem isn't so bad, but IMO it's still there.

[melvin]

It's kinda depressing, thinking that someday we may not be able to tell by ear the difference between analog and it's digital imitation, even though I'm not sure the player will ever get the same feeling from each. However, I do believe that a good-sounding digital distortion, when not necessarily trying to emulate anything in particular, will do some good. Making things cleaner and less noisy in the studio is beside the point. Any knowledgeable studio-tech can solve those problems without handing you a digital distortion pedal. Most creative engineers would cringe at the idea of proposing such a thing anyway.

The funny thing is, history tells us that the crappy pedals of today, be they digital or analog, could easily become sought-after nostalgic fads of the near future. And usually for good reason.

[Mark Hammer]

Digital distortion pedals can sound terrific. The problem is they sound too consistent.

Huh? What we like about analog distortion is that it is very responsive to variations in the signal you feed it, distorting differently for higher and lower strings, for two strings vs one, for power chords, for rapid-fire notes vs held notes, etc. That dynamic variation is a paint palette we can work with, and use to express emotion as it occurs to us. Digitally-generated distortion aims for a specific transformation, and nails it, often without regard to subtle changes in the input signal properties. The limitation there is not the technology, but rather the algorithmic description of the original sound the DSP is supposed to be emulating. Given that the qualities of the analog distortion are so dependent on a number of hard-to-repeat conditions, what exactly should the algorithm BE, and how do you turn that into software?