How much hum is induced in the strings themselves?

[earthtonesaudio]

...For example, how much hum should I expect to hear from a typical piezo equipped acoustic?

[Steve Conner]

None! If it's in proper working order, hum should be below the noise floor of the preamp.

[Chuck H]

Further, The strings on an acoustic guitar have no electrical connection and therefore can't act as transducers in any way. Even on an electric guitar the only possible noise could be buzz (not hum) from an antennea sort of effect, and that isn't very likely either unless there were a ground fault.

If you have hum it's probably a bad amplifier or a bad ground scheme in the preamp design. Or, if your using more than one piece of gear with this rig (an acoustic amp + PA + powered mixer + effects + etc...) it could be ground loop hum. Try lifting the AC ground on all but one piece of gear.

Chuck

[bbsailor]

...For example, how much hum should I expect to hear from a typical piezo equipped acoustic?

Try using the platemate but solder a 1 foot long wire before installing and attach at the output jack ground connection. This will ground the strings and make the guitar more quiet. This is something that should be done on all acoustics that use amplification to ensure lower noise, espicially on those that use magnetic pickups. One way to see if this will help your problem is to interleve a metal ruler between alternate strings and put an alligator clip wire to the ruler and to the jack ground to see if this helps. If not then, your piezo has a different problem.

Measure your pin spacing to obtain the correct model.

See link below.

STEWMAC.COM : Plate Mate

I hope this helps.

Joseph Rogowski

[earthtonesaudio]

Thanks for the replies!


I ended up asking my question here, as I realized that the information I seek really applies only to moving coil pickups, and certainly not to piezo pickups.

Sorry for the confusion!