Pickup sheilding

[dazzlindino]

Have some humbuckers that are fine for live use, but are too noisey in the studio. They are wired with old school style sheilded pushback wire. Where one coil is grounded with the ground portion soldered to baseplate, wired in series internaly, then one hot out.
Would it help if these were wired 4 conductor, with the coil ground not being grounded directly to the baseplate ,or is all moot.
What else could be done?
These pickups are one coil allen slugs and one coil traditional screw through base plate.
Alnico 5
Thanks you Zedi masters, gurus, wizards, and freaks of nature.

[SK66]

It's probably moot. I have seen ground loops occur when the pickup is grounded to the case of the volume/tone pot, but I doubt that's the problem. You could check by rewiring the pickup ground directly to the output jack temporarily. Converting the pickup to 4 wire is usually possible, but there's always the risk of significant damage to the pickup when doing this. Grounding the baseplate separately may affect the pickup's tone.

[David King]

Check the bridge ground i.e. check continuity between strings and jack ground. You want the strings to be grounded along with all the other metal parts on the guitar.

Check coil starts to make sure they aren't shorted to slug and screws, that shouldn't be possible but if one coil's dcr measures significantly different from the other then you won't get full cancellation.

[David Schwab]

I had some covered 80's Gibson Dirty Fingers that were a bit noisy. Great sounding pickups, but they weren't all that quiet. They may have had mismatched coils, but since they were 2 conductor with the vintage cable (plus another one for coil tap) I had no way to tell. They were epoxied into the case, unlike the uncovered version. I ended up selling them because they were too noisy to record with.