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Jazz Shielding Pictorial (Big Images Warning)

#181
Nick Ioannucci said:
yep the otherthing, my dad does electrical for a living and said i should only connect the bare metal drain wire to one side, is this correct? i figured connect it at both sides, or just not use it and tack the shielding right to the copper.
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Yeah, he's correct, though I'm not sure if that particular issue will make much difference at this scale since we're talking about such short runs of "drain". I think he's talking about maintaining the "star ground" configuration to avoid multiple paths to ground and potential "loops", which, in the most extreme case could work against you.
 
#183
Vic said:
Yes, but as long as you use single-coil pickups, you will get that hum... though sometimes more than others depending on your environment. A really really good shielding job should reduce the hum to a very tolerable level, but if that isn't good enough (again, depending on how "rude" the clubs are you play in), humbucking pickups are the only further step you can take.

Also, next time you're in a club like that, try turning off all the neon signs around the stage, and look for any dimmers that you might be able to turn all the way off (no, not all the way down or even all the way up... while that does help, the only way to remove it's effect is to have it SWITCHED off.)

Age-old classic single-coil issue. :)

Hope this helps.
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Thanks a lot Vic.
Gonna try some shielding.
I'm little disapointed in those Fralins, because before I had some old Dimarzio pups, and they were dead quiet.
 
#184
Tihi said:
Thanks a lot Vic.
Gonna try some shielding.
I'm little disapointed in those Fralins, because before I had some old Dimarzio pups, and they were dead quiet.
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Well, FWIW, it's not really Fralins' "fault", per se. Those are great pickups. The simple truth is, there's only one way to REALLY get the single-coil sound... :)
 
#185
Thanks again Vic.

just now I read again some description of diferent pickup noise. It's all a little strange to me.
So I recorded a short audio of my bass.
The first interval is with both pups, then just the bridge p, and the the neck p.
Please, tell me if that kind of noise can be reduced.
It's not a good recording, because I'm home, and I just pluged the bass into the computer.
I prefer the sound of the bass, with the bridge pup full, and the neck about 3/4, but with this amount of noise (especially on higher volumes) it's impossible.

Thanks!
 
#186
Tihi said:
Thanks again Vic.

just now I read again some description of diferent pickup noise. It's all a little strange to me.
So I recorded a short audio of my bass.
The first interval is with both pups, then just the bridge p, and the the neck p.
Please, tell me if that kind of noise can be reduced.
It's not a good recording, because I'm home, and I just pluged the bass into the computer.
I prefer the sound of the bass, with the bridge pup full, and the neck about 3/4, but with this amount of noise (especially on higher volumes) it's impossible.

Thanks!
Click to expand...
Probably. If the noise changes as you turn around, facing the bass in different directions, it's pretty much guaranteed to help a lot, but even if not, it might still help enough to be worth the effort. No matter what, it can not hurt!
 
#187
hi,

This thread is great.. i just bought a pair of Fender jazz originals that come with the brass grouning strip and as i can read here, when i use this star grounding, it's not neccessary to ground to the bridge.. or its not recommended, when i ground to the control plate. so i should cut that stripe off, right? what a shame.......it look so nice to me

;

nice day,

mike
 
#189
vintager said:
hi,

This thread is great.. i just bought a pair of Fender jazz originals that come with the brass grouning strip and as i can read here, when i use this star grounding, it's not neccessary to ground to the bridge.. or its not recommended, when i ground to the control plate. so i should cut that stripe off, right? what a shame.......it look so nice to me

;

nice day,

mike
Click to expand...

This is an awesome thread! Good work to all who have contributed!!! I've learned stuff I never knew before on here!

thanks for pullin' this thread out of the grave, this has been a great read (I skipped some stuff.....)

I'm actually about to do some work in my own basses, and the wires (ground) seemed to be grounded to the pots. I'm adding push/pull to both basses (one bass is getting new pots) and should I take off the ground to the pots and ground them to the lug or the jack ground? It would be great to simplify that whole thing... only reason I'm not going hardcore on shielding is cuz I haven't really noticed any nasty hum or buzz whenever I plug the bass in.

I'm gonna be workin' on a sx-jazz v/v/t and an olp mm3 which is also v/v/t I think.... Only thing I have noticed w/ the olp is that the sound gets distorted when one or both of the volumes is all the way. Will changing the pots (250 to 500) and not grounding to the pots help with that? Or is that a pickup problem? (Many will attest that to being a cheap bass problem... but oh well, I love my basses, just want to get the best sound out of them as possible).

Also... (I had a thought to continue w/ this, but a recent phone call has completly de-railed my train....)

I'll just leave it that, maybe my other thought will come back to me, if anyone could answer me questions that would be great!
 
#192
Dean N said:
Just wanted to notify the Lyle (and the Mods!) that the pics aren't working. I just finished my own first shielding job, and wanted to compare with this excellent reference thread, but the pics didn't work.
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Check post #103 in this thread. I have it all captured in a word doc.
 
#194
I'm in the process of shielding my 60's Jazz re-issue. The original set up has a copper plate that the pots are grounded to. It also has these copper plates under each pick-up. I'm shielding with Stew-Mack adhesive copper tape. Do I need to de-solder the wiring from the original copper plates and remove them? Or, can I just put everything back in as is and have the shielding tape and the grounding plates doubling up on the noise? Please excuse my technical ignorance and hope that makes sense.
 
#195
SonicBlueMeanie said:
I'm in the process of shielding my 60's Jazz re-issue. The original set up has a copper plate that the pots are grounded to. It also has these copper plates under each pick-up. I'm shielding with Stew-Mack adhesive copper tape. Do I need to de-solder the wiring from the original copper plates and remove them? Or, can I just put everything back in as is and have the shielding tape and the grounding plates doubling up on the noise? Please excuse my technical ignorance and hope that makes sense.
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You can do either. They're no longer necessary.
 
#197
one thing I wanted to say about copper shielding vs shielding paint: I used to love copper shielding, all my basses have them. But after 8-9 years, the backing glue went bye-bye, so the sides of the control cavity are peeling and touching the wires. And that was good copper shielding I bought from Lane Poor back in the day. So I will consider paint for my next shielding. :hmm:
 
#198
joeyl said:
one thing I wanted to say about copper shielding vs shielding paint: I used to love copper shielding, all my basses have them. But after 8-9 years, the backing glue went bye-bye, so the sides of the control cavity are peeling and touching the wires. And that was good copper shielding I bought from Lane Poor back in the day. So I will consider paint for my next shielding. :hmm:
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I've tried the paint, and IMHO, it sux by comparison. I'd much rather just make it habit to pop the cover off and check it every year or two.
 
#199
This has been an absolutely awesome thread! Kudos for the great instructions and follow-up!

I made a project of putting new pups in a Yamaha BB-1200 (bought new in '78), deciding on a Seymour Duncan Musicman SMB-4A bridge pup (that's a long story...) and DiMarzio DP122 P-pups where the original Yamaha split pups were in the neck position. So, it's sort of a PJ setup, except that the "J" is a SD MM.

On the first try I used a little 3-way toggle switch that had already been in the bass for 25 or so years to switch between front/both/back pup combinations. However, there was a *lot* of noise, hence a search and discovery of this great thread.

I'm happy to say that the quasi-star grounding and copper shielding has killed all the noise as far as my ears can tell. And replacing the toggle with a blending pot has of course enabled (potentially) more tone variations.

However, the problem I'm now having is that in the center full-blend position, the volume is down about 25% as compared to either pup solo position. That is, the DiMarzio P pups and the Musicman pup each by themselves seem to be at about the same volume, and blending them produces a combined sound, but at a lower volume.

Further, -- and I'm not sure how much this enters into it -- in the center blend position, the DiMarzio P-pups tend to dominate the sound. A truer 50/50 blend between the two pickups comes by turning the blend pot more toward the bridge MM pup to mix it in more. Even then, though, the volume is still way down. In fact, the volume maxes only in the two pup solo positions. Every blend position is muted.

I'm using 500K pots for V/B/T, all new, with a .047 green cap. Is there some kind of electrical "balancing" issue between these admittedly very different pups? Do I need a different combination or set of pots? I think Lyle posted something early on about inserting a resistor somewhere to balance the pickups. Would something like that apply here? FWIW, the specs on the pups indicate that the DC resistance for the DiMarzios is 11.3k, and 4.18k for the SD MM.

Predictably, it's really the blended sound that I'm after!

Any ideas?


Thanks in advance...
 
#200
I got the copper tape comming in the mail and should be here shortly. I just have one of my basses to shield, my 1982 Schecter PJ. The "J" pu seems to be the biggest culpret.

Has anyone actually wraped the coils on the pu with the copper tape and if so would there be any advantages / disadvantages doing this?

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.
 

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