Shielding a Strat Guitar to Eliminate Hum and EMI Noise

For those of you who have a single coil pickup guitar or have had one such as a Fender Stratocaster or Fender Telecaster, know what a nice instrument it is and its trademark tone, but also know how noisy it can get, not like humbucker guitars, especially if played through high gains and heavy distortions.

I currently own a strat guitar that eventually I have been readjusting to my needs, playing preferences and style and have done a great hell of a job by adjusting the neck's tross rod, string height, fret dressing and intonation. The guitar has a nice set of pickups and I'm very happy with it and all the adjusting I've done to it, except, just like all single coil guitars (as I mentioned above) are just doomed for life to receive all kinds of outside noise and amplifying it through your speakers, making your playing and recording experience without hiss and hum a painful moment.

Unfortunately I live in an area where recording my music with my guitar is a bit hard both at day and night. Since I live in an over-populated area of my hometown (that is over-populated with craftsmen and other type of workers such as metal smiths and carpenters) there's all kinds of heavy duty machinery operating near my house at day, such as drills, power saws, air compressors, soldering systems (thank god my ears don't pick all this noise up, otherwise I'd be a little more messed in the head than what I am now, but my guitar does!) and if that's not enough, just my computer, modem and router are enough to blame for EMI noise, then when night comes and everyone is sleeping and no more drills and saws operating, the muse comes to my house and starts turning me on in her sexiest ways, excitedly I jump off my seat, grab my guitar and start creating music, but the excitement fades away quickly as I find out that my favorite night lamp next to my computer, which is a halogen quartz with dimmer gives me more noise than all the other things together at day, that is why dimmer lights should always be avoided in any recording studio.

Anyway, I decided to do the taboo and give the ridiculous a try.... I took all of my guitar apart, did the famous shielding and amazingly was surprised with the finishing results. I expected a 20% more silence in my recording line (if not maybe even more noise). The truth is I achieved about 80% silence, only if I use a heavy distortion or overdriven high gain amp I will hear some hiss, but just the normal noise that these effects create, but nothing the noise gate on my Boss GT-8 effects board can't quiet down without affecting my tone or killing my sustain. Please note that not always this will work with 100% guarantee and you will still get a bit of humming.

So before you rush into the music store in search of quieter pickups, you might want to try this out, will probably turn out your pickups were in very good shape after all, only your guitar was not properly shielded.

Also note that there might be a slight change in the tone sound, but in my case this was very noticeable  because I changed the 500KHz pots to 250KHz type which is what they should be originally for a strat.

So here goes, I took a few pictures with my process, so I will explain below with each image and hope you find this helpful.

WARNING: IF YOU DON'T FEEL COMFORTABLE TAKING YOUR GUITAR APART AND MESSING WITH ALL IT'S ELECTRONICS, I RECOMMEND NOT TO DO THIS THEN AND TAKE YOUR GUITAR TO A PROFESSIONAL WHO KNOWS HOW TO DO THIS PROPERLY AND HAVE HIM DO IT FOR YOU.

LIST OF MATERIALS NEEDED:

1- Heavy Duty aluminum foil (Any food supply store will have this one, just remember to get the thickest one available). I fully recommend to use aluminum foil instead of copper foil, since it's the only known material to shield EMI noise from dimmer lamps (in my case), it's amazing what a thousand's of an inch of aluminum can stop compared to one inch of copper (especially the dimmer EMI).

2- Soldering Iron (I would recommend a 30 watt one, a little higher can ruin electronic parts if placed too long on them, especially if you don't have much experience with them).

3- Solder and flux

4- Regular rubber glue

5- Adhesive tape and insulating tape

6- Cutter or x-acto knife (x-acto will be better)

7- New shielded audio cable (can be between 18 - 22 gauge) and preferably 1ft black and 1ft white. That way you know which are hot wires (white) and which will be grounding wires (black), avoid using mutithreaded copper cable, using audio (silver core) and single core type is the best.

8- Masking Tape and permanent felt tip pen to write on masking tape (Please! Do yourself an intelligent favor and tag you parts so you know when you put it all together what goes where and what is what, I don't want e-mails or comments asking me to help you put your axe together)

9- Regular transparent scotch tape to help adhere the foil, but we don't want to completely use this all the time since we want a nice continuous electric flow in all the aluminum foil, so just use it on the top part where the foil overlaps.

10- Small thin piece of copper sheet strips, this will be used to solder the grounding wires to the shielding environment, and since the environment will be aluminum foil, we all know solder DOES NOT STICK to aluminum (you did know that right?, well now you know).

11- A few small screws for wood to anchor the copper strips to the guitar cavity that will be used as a ground bridge to the ground wires.

12- A multimeter will come handy to check that the flow within the aluminum foil is continuous.

13- Notepad and pencil, please! Draw simple diagrams of how everything is hooked up before you start ripping it all apart, I'm serious about the e-mails, I don't want to read about anyone asking me for help on how to put it all back together.

14- A digital camera will really help, if you are just not good at drawing or sketching wiring diagrams, this will be a plus then, don't rely on your memory, unless you have photographic memory, which I don't.

Ok, let's Rock & Roll......!

(Click on Images for larger view)

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Here's the guitar still whole and where you can still stop and think if you really want to do this or not. Notice some of the materials needed,  I know, there's no beer, but that comes when we are finished, you really want to be on your 5 senses when doing this (or as many senses GOD has given you to wander about life), besides having liquids nearby these type of projects isn't a very good idea either.

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We take off the strings and disassemble the neck from the body.

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When I took out the input jack, I was surprised to see such a messy soldering job! (Maybe someone has tinkered with this guitar before, and did a terrible job). Here you might want to take note or draw a sketch of where the hot wire and ground wire go, if better take a picture.

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 Then we take the trem bridge out, desolder the grounding wire that goes via to the strings and we take the pickguard out, notice all the cheap electronics in this strat, amazingly I have found out that even on the more expensive strats costing hundreds of dollars you will still find some of these cheap components inside made somewhere in the far east probably assembled by a poor underpayed kid. I guess that's what can happen with some MIM or other guitars manufactured in other parts of the globe even if they are licensed by Fender. So I decided to order some original parts made in the U.S.A (that's what the package says) to change them and show the far east economy that I just don't dig their manufacturing quality and don't support their child labor.

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Then we start cutting our foil and start fitting it inside the electronics cavity. Remember we are going to cage the whole electronics inside with foil so this is a tedious and slow process, so go slowly and neatly to achieve the best results.

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Now we start spreading some of the rubber glue on the cavity and place our foil. Remember not to put glue between the overlaps of the foil or this will act as an insulator between the aluminum foil breaking the electric continuity, just use regular transparent tape over both laps so underneath they do make contact. Notice the little tabs around the cavity, these are very important since we will also paste foil to the pickguard and we want it to make contact with the foil in the cavity to make sure it's practically all caged.

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And here we can see a finished view of the cavity completely shielded with foil.

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Now it's time to work on the pickguard. Please note how I tagged everything with a permanent marker and some masking tape, you should do the same! In my case, this is not very important because I will replace all these cheap electronics with original Fender®, that is the three 250K Pots, 5 Way switch and tone transistor. The pots in this guitar were originally 500K, that is just not right, those are good pots for a humbucker but for a single coil, they should be 250K.

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Here's a closer look at the cheap electronics. Notice the terrible wiring and soldering, all grounds are soldered directly to the pot casings, this is part of the noise to be blamed for, all this is called ground loops, also the 5 way switch is probably the worst kind, these things don't last long. The pickups were in good shape, and the middle pickup was polarity reversed which is good also, it means that when you have two pickups active you have the humbucker effect and noise is eliminated when using both pickups at the same time, but we all know that strats sound far better when using one single pickup.

See the little piece of foil behind the three pots? That's the shielding made at the original manufacturing company. 50 years ago when they started making these guitars and the amps where not so over-gained, and there were no computers, and other bizarre futuristic gadgets that created all kinds of interference as there is today, this was acceptable.....not today, so we will take off all the electronics from the pickguard, including pickups and we will definitely remove that crappy piece of foil.

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After removing all the electronics and little piece of foil, we apply some of the adhesive rubber glue on all the back of the pickguard and place it over a sheet of aluminum foil.

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Once the adhesive rubber glue is dry and the foil is firmly glued to the pickguard we can use a cutter or x-acto knife and carefully start cutting out all the holes where pickups, switches, pots and screws go, it's easier and safer for the pickguard to do this on the back side to prevent some nasty scratches. Also I found it easier to use a pencil or ball point pen for the small holes.

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Now we reinstall our electronics, but in a different manner. Here I am replacing with the originals, boy! The quality of craftsmanship on these things is out of this world. They are even heavier than the far east ones. So I fully recommend, if your strat comes with the cheap line of electronics, I fully advise on purchasing some originals, don't think just because you paid good money for your guitar the components will be original, this really depends where your guitar was manufactured.

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Once the three pots and 5 way switch are in place we can start soldering the cables. Now I want you to take a good look at this picture, I did a personal modification here which affects the original tone control for the middle pickup. The wire originally goes on the second soldering tab of the 5 way switch selector (look at red circles I painted on image), but I placed it on the third, because I rarely use the middle pickup, either I like bridge or neck pickups the most. The thing is that strats don't have tone control for the bridge pickup, only middle and neck, so I decided to have tone for bridge and neck by swapping this cable, if you want things just the way they were originally, then solder that cable to the second tab and not the third as I did. The tone in the guitar really changes with this mod, and I really like it myself, but it's a matter of personal taste. If you want to do this modification you might want to use a smaller value capacitor, since you can loose a little punch on the bridge side, I went on and soldered the original cap that came with the pots, and really do like it.

UPDATE: You can also add a small wire between those 2 soldering tabs and your first tone will affect both bridge and middle pickup (see renders below). I recently changed my mod that way and works perfectly well! Remember that this is all a matter of personal taste, you can try and test yourself what you like most.

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Just some more progress of soldering the parts back...

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And here's a little more progress, almost there.....

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Here we can see the new tone capacitor being placed, I stripped another thin wire and used the green plastic covering to shield the cap's wires so they don't touch other components, it's a good idea since it's a tight space and when placing it all together, things tend to squash a bit. One end of cap is going, guess where, to a whole bunch of little black cables, this is our ground cables, no more ground loops or soldering them directly on the pot casings! Notice the copper strip, all the ground wires will be attached to it via another wire soldered directly to it, this way the ground communicates with all the aluminum foil, creating the perfect shielding. I found out that using the 5 way switch mounting screw as a medium to hold the copper strip in place was just perfect.

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Now we want to use some insulating tape to protect all those grounding wires. Since they are now on the loose and free to move about anywhere they feel like we don't want them making contact with the hot connections.

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Now we go back to the body and start soldering the jack plate to the wires and put it back in place.....

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What I did here then was puncture the foil where the grounding wire to the tremolo bridge goes and solder it to an anchored copper strip with a screw, this also makes sure all the grounding is directly making contact with the aluminum foil.

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And we are ready! Just solder the bridge grounding wire to the bridge plate and the jack cables back in place. Just remember all black (ground) cables must go together where they meet on the pick guard. Finish assembling and you should have a much quieter guitar. You now have permission to go and grab a beer (or two) if everything is working fine.

Cheers!

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Here are two 3D renders so you can have a better and easier look at all this wiring mess and so you can use as a wiring guide..

One shows the stock wiring and the other the shielded way. Click on images for larger view.

IF YOU FIND THIS INFORMATION USEFUL, WOULD YOU PLEASE CONSIDER A SMALL KIND DONATION? THANKS!
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