Guitar Buzzes, Not Properly Grounded Mes Thinks

[Duggy]

Problem, my guitar buzzes alot unless I touch either the volume or tone knob or touch the poles pieces on the pups . It doesn't however stop if I touch the strings.

Its a H-S-H setup, 1 vol, 1 tone and a 5 way switch. Before you say ground it to the brige, it's a floyd rose.

Any help?

[GregP]

You can ground floyd bridges...! But you're not grounding your wiring "to" the bridge. You're grounding your bridge (and other components) TO the ground lug of the output jack.

Definitely ground your bridge; otherwise, nothing will happen when you touch the strings.

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In general, sounds like you have a ground loop. The most sure-fire way to avoid a ground loop is to create a "star grounding" scheme. All this means is that all of your grounds (including desoldering the bent vol knob lug from the casing and attaching a wire instead) will go to one central "collector" like a metal O-ring or something. And I mean ALL the grounds. Then, once they're all soldered there, you run a final wire from the "star" to the output jack's ground lug. Use electrical tape on any exposed ground wires and wrap up your star, and you should be set.

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Probably not the cause, but check this out: I rewired my lap steel 2 nights ago. Got a diagram, figured everything out, decided to just use a pot casing as my "star" for grounding (it was only a Hum + vol + jack!), and thought I had followed the (very simple) diagram perfectly. Hummed like mad, particularly when I touched the strings. "Ground problem!" I thought... but I couldn't for the life of me trace it. I desoldered everything except the jack (which of course, was wired perfectly, right?) and used alligator clips to shift things around and test a different configuration. Mainly, I thought that because the pickup was an unknown pickup (a generic rails pickup from a Kramer) that I had got the wire colours mixed up (I used an SD diagram).

To make a long story short, it was only after testing a few configs with no success that I somehow managed to notice that my output jack was wired in reverse.

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The moral of the stories: Star ground everything. And, in addition to your other trouble-shooting, triple-check that your output jack is wired correctly.

Greg