Guild B301 Hiss

[malikcamlica]

I have a Guild B301 and B301-A and I love them but the pickups are quite noisy. Specially if I turn the tone up. I do not want to change the pickups because I love their tone. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions besides shielding all the cavities. I already did that and it does not help.

 

[mellowgerman]

Some single-coils unfortunately just have more inherent audible 60 cycle hum than others. Shielding is step-one, so good that you've done that.
One thing I've done in the past is to use a .0047uf cap (or something close to that) to send to ground the highest highs via switch or pot. You could for example install push-pull tone pots, and make the up-position swap the stock tone cap for a .0047uf. Then when you roll off the tone, it will only get rid of the highest highs, which should leave your overall tone intact, but cut down on some of any annoying hiss that is present. It won't get rid of all of it, but should make it more tolerable.
Some may recommend a pedal like the EH "Humdebugger" which can help BUT will also have an impact on your tone with strange glitchy digital sort of artifacts... they are subtle, but were noticeable enough to my ears to make the pedal useless. I preferred to just deal with the hum of a solo'd Bisonic than to let the "fix" mess with my tone and dynamics, but others may have different experiences.

 

[LoveThatBass]

I have found the lowest noise in a single coil is where the negative side is directly connected to the final wires on the outer layer and provides some shielding of noise.

 

[FrenchBassQC]

I had a cat like that also, shielding it didn't work. Sorry, I cannot help here other than suggesting to replace the pickups with less sensitive ones relative to the 60 cycles hum.

 

[mellowgerman]

A more extreme solution would be to have a dummy coil wound, that you could hide under the pickguard. Any pro pickup maker would likely be able to do this for you, but it may require some wood to be routed. Also may impact the high end of the frequency spectrum a bit on your pickup's response to have the extra coil in the circuit, but that should eliminate most if not all of your hum.

One more idea, you could experiment with shielding the plastic pickup casings as well, but that can also impact the tone of the pickup. Worth a try though, just apply copper tape over top and side of the pickup, you can even make holes for the poles. Obviously the copper tape just has to make proper contact with ground or the rest of the shielding. If you find it impacts the tone negatively, you'll just have to remove the tape and potentially clean up a bit of sticky gunk. If you do like the result though, you can maybe try shielding the inside of the pickup covers (if they're easily removable) if you don't like the look of oxidizing copper tape OVER your pickups... I kinda like it on my EB-0(MG) where it was necessary due to the combination of the hifi Barden pickups and the active filter electronics.60 cycle hum wasn't the problem, but they needed extra shielding since they are super-responsive/sensitive, designed for passive use, so the active filter peak would bring on some excess hiss in some settings.