Ground noise problem

[BAG]

Here's the page I followed for shielding your bass. It's certainly not a bad thing to do for any single coil bass or guitar. Use good copper foil with conductive adhesive and you won't need to do any soldering of the shielding.

Also, here's some a bit of info from this page in relation to noise

• If your bass hums once you touch the strings (but is otherwise quiet), you have a grounding issue.
• If your instrument hums but becomes quiet once you touch the strings, you have a shielding issue.

It sounds like you have a shielding issue, but also a lack of connection from your controls or cavities to your bridge. While you're doing the shielding you might find that by inter-connecting all the cavities you get the connection problem sorted as well, or at least find out where the issue is. I'd never done it myself before getting my Jag and it's not hard. I found that I also had to shield the inside of my J pup to get rid of most of the noise. If you go this far make sure the copper tape goes around to the outside of the pup cover and has a couple of layers so as to touch the inside shielding as per the photo below.

Disclosure: The attached photo is not mine, but mine is nearly as neat however, I just cut little rectangles around the holes for the pole pieces as I was concerned that if the shielding touched the pole pieces it might cause problems. I'm happy for someone to discredit that line of thinking for me on my next bass I shield or confirm my theory. I'm not technical enough to know either way.

 

[eric_B]

Thanks for the info BAG, I'll check it out.