Ok, so first and foremost to clarify a couple of things. As Walterw and SGD said, if you touch the strings and the noise stops you have a shielding issue, if you touch them and the noise gets louder you have a grounding issue. I've known this for years but never knew why until it was explained earlier in the thread. Excessive noise is a serious issue and should be treated as such, a hum is an issue, I like many, am sick of being told nothing is wrong with an instrument. It's an electric instrument not an acoustic one. Lastly, apparently 99% of guitar techs tell you this cannot be helped (it is not just Nashville, Guy n. cognito)
I had never spent a lot of time on another stingray outside of mine, I had played quiet knock-off's so I didn't know if the hum was common.
rollno
My Stingray also would pop on initial string contact apparently due to static electricity build up. I was told this by a local guitar repair man, he also said it was a common un-fixable issue with Les Paul's. My hum was so bad I would describe it as offensive, a new bass player at my jam space had a 2-band, it was silent. I knew mine was fudged. Keep in mind when I say silent, it's not dead silent, the pickups are inherently quite noisy and do pick up a lot of unwanted noise. In fact even now with the treble boost at max you can actually hear my fingers going over the pickups, but as earlier stated these basses do not sound good with that knob cranked.
I initially shielded the control cavity when I first got the bass, I had used tin foil tape like they use for ductwork. I re-set the ground wire under the bridge, I also added a ground wire to the pickup jack, it is grounded through the metal plate, but why not start easy. This really didn't do much if anything for the noise.
Next attempt, was a couple days ago, where I added the copper foil lining to the pickup cover as well as in the pickup cavity on the body. I made sure to clear out the copper tape from the leads on the pickup covers. You don't want the leads touching the copper. This did help a little but not at all to my level of satisfaction.
Nobody responded in regards to running foil under all the pole pieces so I was still very unsure of this step. It did not seem to work for post #39. I am not qualified to do any of this so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Instead all I did was run a wire between the pickup cavity and the control cavity and soldered it from the copper pickup cavity foil to the ground on the control board. I didn't make pictures because there are plenty on the subject already.
This also stopped the buzz you got when you actually touch the pole pieces. I'm sure you all found that made the issue worse as I did.
I think that about covers my long, over posted, pretentious, advice. I just hope that everybody else can now go out and remove the hum from their own musicman.
Cheers!
