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Elixir Strings Not Grounded?


Geo

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The player is a giant ball of hum and needs grounded.

I think this sums it up. I am an antenna collecting and radiating EMI. If I'm not grounded, I'm live, and feeding EMI into the guitar. If I'm grounded, the EMI all goes to ground, hence the lack of buzz.

The strings being grounded is just the simplest way to get my big antenna ass grounded. :D I could wear a wrist band with a wire connected to ground and the guitar would never buzz, even with my hands off the strings (ignoring single-coil hum etc.).

That's my understanding anyway (basically what Elmo is saying).

Edited by Geo
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The human body is not a "giant ball of hum that needs grounding". All of the man made crap around us is what generates all the EMI that our guitars pick up and then gets amplified by our amplifiers. The human body absorbs it (maybe to ill effect), it does not "radiate" it, we are not radio towers emitting EMI. Where did you ever get this idea from? That is why there is all this concern about living too close to power substations and that cell phones might cause brain cancer and that sort of thing.

Our bodies are more like a capacitor with stored energy, or under the right circumstances, a conductor. In the latter case, it can be deadly, as in being electrocuted. I've seen what that can do to someone, people who died from a massive voltage/current - their arms were like charcoal or part of their bodies were burnt to a crisp. It's not pretty. And rubber soled shoes are not a safeguard, stuff can arc and kill you anyway, it just finds the path of least resistance to ground which can travel through your body even though your rubber soled shoes are supposed to be an insulator.

Anyway, the fact that the buzz/hum goes away when you touch the strings means that your body is acting like a capacitor to ground. Although it may not necessarily literally grounded, it has the same effect. The fact you can touch the guitar strings with rubber soled shoes on and make the buzz go away doesn't mean anything. Your body is just acting like an air core capacitor that has enough capacitance to kill that buzzing sound.

Also, one needs to make a distinction between "buzz" and "hum". Hum is generally 60Hz mains noise. Buzz is typically from poorly rectified power supplies like wall warts, and is a 120Hz ripple on the power supply due to no filter capacitor being used to smooth it out after rectification, or one that is too small to be useful when used for audio applications.

Edited by Paul Marossy
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The human body is not a "giant ball of hum that needs grounding". All of the man made crap around us is what generates all the EMI that our guitars pick up and then gets amplified by our amplifiers. The human body absorbs it (maybe to ill effect), it does not "radiate" it, we are not radio towers emitting EMI. Where did you ever get this idea from? That is why there is all this concern about living too close to power substations and that cell phones might cause brain cancer and that sort of thing.

Our bodies are more like a capacitor with stored energy, or under the right circumstances, a conductor. In the latter case, it can be deadly, as in being electrocuted. I've seen what that can do to someone, people who died from a massive voltage/current - their arms were like charcoal or part of their bodies were burnt to a crisp. It's not pretty. And rubber soled shoes are not a safeguard, stuff can arc and kill you anyway, it just finds the path of least resistance to ground which can travel through your body even though your rubber soled shoes are supposed to be an insulator.

Anyway, the fact that the buzz/hum goes away when you touch the strings means that your body is acting like a capacitor to ground. Although it may not necessarily literally grounded, it has the same effect. The fact you can touch the guitar strings with rubber soled shoes on and make the buzz go away doesn't mean anything. Your body is just acting like an air core capacitor that has enough capacitance to kill that buzzing sound.

Also, one needs to make a distinction between "buzz" and "hum". Hum is generally 60Hz mains noise. Buzz is typically from poorly rectified power supplies like wall warts, and is a 120Hz ripple on the power supply due to little or no filter capacitor being used to smooth it out after rectification.

I agree with most of the above.

I have never suggested that the human body is radiating EMI.

Your body is, indeed, "acting like a capacitor to ground" - one which concentrates the ambient EMI.

Your body is right next to the guitar, so the guitar picks it up.

When you ground yourself, you eliminate your body's portion of the total EMI,

anything left buzzing/humming is direct radiation from the source of the EMI.

Think about the fallacy in the reasoning that by touching the strings you are conducting the hum to ground through your body...

Why would attaching a capacitor-to-ground to an already grounded point improve matters?

Edited by elmo7sharp9
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Think about the fallacy in the reasoning that by touching the strings you are conducting the hum to ground through your body...

Why would attaching a capacitor-to-ground to an already grounded point improve matters?

Read this page: http://www.audereaudio.com/FAQ_PUNoise.htm - I didn't realize that we have a voltage at the power line frequency from power lines being imposed on our bodies. This guy measured more than 11V peak on his own body. So there is also a voltage potential thing and capacitive coupling. Very interesting new piece of information I didn't have before. Kind of wild that 10% of the line voltage in my walls is being picked up by my body just sitting here typing this. :D

So this means that you are lowering the voltage potential between you and the ground on your guitar when you touch the strings, which has the effect of acting like a capacitor to ground in the sense that it makes the noise go away (thinking more in terms of RFI).

But the buzzing is a classic symptom of a guitar not being properly grounded and/or shielded. So I am still baffled by why coated strings would cause this problem. Maybe because it increases the voltage potential between the player and ground? That must be it. :D

Edited by Paul Marossy
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Excellent article.

So this means that you are lowering the voltage potential between you and the ground on your guitar when you touch the strings,

YES !

which has the effect of acting like a capacitor to ground in the sense that it makes the noise go away (thinking more in terms of RFI).

Not quite there yet...

Your body is the capacitor and, unless you've bought Elixir strings or omitted the string ground connection,

you are grounding your body through the strings, eliminating the electrostatic coupling by effectively shorting your body to ground - you've just eliminated the hum signal from your body by shorting that electrostatically-induced potential to ground.

But the buzzing is a classic symptom of a guitar not being properly grounded and/or shielded. So I am still baffled by why coated strings would cause this problem. Maybe because it increases the voltage potential between the player and ground? That must be it. :D

Don't be unsure, you're nearly there!

The player is insulated from the strings by Elixir's non-conductive coating.

So, when the player touches Elixir strings, the 11v AC from the article is not conducted to ground

(as regular strings would do),

and so still exists as an AC potential along the dimensions of the player's body and,

in the absence of an effective electrostatic shield between the player's body and the guitar's circuit,

couples electrostatically with any nearby

unshielded part of the guitar's circuit

(e.g. unshielded pickup coils and unshielded wire in unshielded cavities).

The upside of all this is that the logic behind one of the OP's options

(use active pickups) is now perfectly clear:

You can get away with omitting the string ground...

If you have good electrostatic shielding (like the all-enclosing brass shielding in EMGs)

around ALL parts of the guitar's circuit

(though the pickup coils are the most susceptible point,

shielding cavities and all connecting wires contributes the last 5% to hum avoidance).

Edited by elmo7sharp9
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Interesting discussion! That article really clarifies things. I think I'm going to try better shielding in this guitar.

Side note... the "ungrounded noise" I'm getting is definitely a buzz, not a hum. 120Hz and harmonics of that. I don't hear any 60Hz, and I would, because I keep my lows cranked on my amp, hehe.

I should add: I get a crackly sound (i.e. intermittent buzz) when sliding to a different position on a string, with my playing hand off the strings. Again, this seems to indicate that the coating is intermittently preventing me from being grounded (whether I am a capacitor or an antenna. :D )

Edited by Geo
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Yeah, this was an interesting discussion. I learned a couple of new things, too.

So, do small/skinny guys hum less? :D

Does Leslie West hum less than he used to?

Well, I am not a big guy. I'm kinda skinny, and I have never had much of these sorts of problems with guitars. Hmm... :D

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