Is String Grounding Necessary?

[Steve A.]

FWIW before I read those articles on Guitar Nuts back around 1998 I had treated signal returns and grounds interchangeably in all of my custom wiring harnesses, thinking that the less wire connecting the various components, the quieter the guitar would be. Wrong!

Everything on the website is pure crap. And that's being polite. Two of the biggest are star grounding, and wrapping pickups in foil.

You only have one ground point in a guitar, so star grounding does nothing. You can't have a ground loop. But I have found that redundant ground paths often help, which goes against the idea of star grounding. If you have a buzz you can't get rid of, run two ground wires to the jack! Shouldn't matter, but it does.

#1. The Guitar Nuts site was quite different when it first started out with the guy just offering some ideas that he had come up with, some of which made sense, some of which didn't. I'll see if I can locate some printouts I made back in 1998/99... someday (not today!) I usually find things when I am looking for something else so I'll add it to my list.

#2. This has absolutely nothing to with ground loops- it is about the wiring in a guitar acting as an antenna picking up "stray crap from the ether" as I like to call it. Gibson connected the 4 pots in their LP's with 3 ground wires, not 4, to keep them from acting as a loop antenna. Not that I ever noticed a difference but they certainly considered it to be important.

#3. The idea is to put all of the various shields and grounds together on your guitar and let them battle it out before adding the combined signal returns from the pickups and pots. Doing that has made my guitars much quieter. (I've been shielding the cavities since that fateful day in 1977 when some the MEK-based conductive paint leaked through to the top of my 1976 LP Standard- ouch! Stars Guitars recommended putting masking tape on the holes for the pots but I figured that Scotch Magic Tape would work just as well... )

Steve A.

[Steve A.]

Is my terminology clear? I'm not sure if I'm using the correct language so my message is clear. Also is RFI the correct term for the noise or should it be EMF?

EMI is what afflicts electric guitars. EMF just means "electromagnetic field" and RFI refers to radio frequency interference that is way beyond human hearing.

I lump all of that crap together and call it "gremlins from the ether" whether the source is the transformers in a nearby guitar amp, the nearby underground power lines or is actually on the AC supply voltage powering my amp.

Speaking of RFI can it produce beat frequencies which are in the audible range of hearing for humans? And what exactly do you call it when your equipment picks up a local radio station?

David, when you shielded your bass did it have any effect on the tone? Some say that the shielding adds capacitance. I think I hear a difference sometimes with different cables, my pedal board and volume pedal definitely take a slice of brilliance out and I want as much brilliance as I can get.

If the lead wires touch the shielding, they will be close enough to capacitively couple, but will do so less than even a foot worth of guitar cable, so the sort of difference you hear if you swap an 8ft for a 9ft cable, which is to say, no audible difference.

I have noticed no difference in tone after shielding a control cavity but adding copper foil tape around pickup coils is an entirely different matter. Not necessarily the capitance effect but it could be a bit like adding a cover to a humbucker.

Steve A.

[Steve A.]

P.P.S. If anybody thinks that this thread should be moved to a different forum please chime in. I did at first but then I came to appreciate the answers by the people who frequent this forum. Maybe when it has run its course here I could move it to a different forum for a fresh take on things...

Maybe open & immediately close a one-message thread in another forum that "points" to this thread?

Thanks for the suggestion... I did exactly that!

http://music-electronics-forum.com/t42803/

Steve Ahola

[copperheadroads]

Is String Grounding Necessary?
Electric : Yes ,Acoustic : no

[salvarsan]

Addendum

Morrison's book on electrical noise has a 2016 release,

Grounding and Shielding: Circuits and Interference, Sixth Edition
Print ISBN: 9781119183747

Lowest price is ~$75 from the usual perpetrators but Wiley&Spawn has some samples at Grounding and Shielding: Circuits and Interference, Sixth Edition - Morrison - Wiley Online Library

This time, Wiley is uncharacteristically generous for "samples" means 15-30 pages of each chapter plus unabridged front and back matter.

A terrific insight conveyed in the introduction (something I am normally disinclined to read) goes:

We need to appreciate that nearly all electrical activity
takes place in the spaces between conductors.
It is the intent of this book to clearly point out
how his very key idea can solve problems.

And elsewhere:

It is about all the things that happen when
an education meets the real world.

I love it when they talk dirty.

[John Kolbeck]

We need to appreciate that nearly all electrical activity
takes place in the spaces between conductors.

I guess the profundity of this quote is lost on me.