Kemper humming

  • My kemper get lots of hum, especially with the single coils in my house. I am guessing that I am getting a lot of electromagnetic interference.


    If I had an electrician come to house (I think I could have a distant friend who is an electrician come to the house) would he know what is causing the problems and be able to solve it..is it worth having a guy come out and fix sockets that have reverse polarity or not grounded, etc...I just want to enjoy my kemper amp without all the extra hum...

  • I am in the same boat. Real bad case of EMI and I have shielded all of my guitars with only minor improvement. I built a portable EMI sniffer (battery brick -> high gain 40db solid state amp -> single coil pup, and small speaker) and have mapped out the worst areas of my house. They are all near electrical outlets and wire runs in walls and under the floor. I have an old house and some outlets are not grounded (they only have the old 2 prong sockets). I have not been able to identify any particular appliance that might be causing the noise, but I haven't ruled that out yet . I think I'm going to put my sniffer in a noisy location and have my wife cut power at the fuse box to various rooms and see if I can narrow the search. If I cant find a particular device to turn off that will help quell the noise, I am planning on calling an electrician out and show him my problem to see what he can do.


    Oh, and I should add that I've had my Kemper and guitars out of the house and they always sound way better just about anywhere I go. Way less noisy, and then I always come back home and swear at my stupid house when I cant get a good mojo going because of the noise.

  • Same as digital bliss, I hear it both when playing and not playing. The playing masks it a little bit, but its still there, and when I stop playing its very obviously there. Touching the strings or metal parts on a guitar doesn't stop the sound either, its still there.


    I could turn the noise gate up but it doesn't solve the problem. I will get rid of the sound when I am not playing, but once I start playing and I strum a chord or hit a note the initial volume of the chord or note masks the volume of the hum, but if once the chord or note starts to lose its sustain and volume, the hum becomes very audible and annoying, its louder than the chord or note.

  • Yes, same for me. Since this discussion reminded me of my sorry state, I did a little more research. As it turns out, the wiring and devices in your house can create two types of effects. They can induce electric fields and magnetic fields. Guitar pickups are sensitive to magnetic field variations, and are much less sensitive to electric field variations. This is important because you can get big magnetic fields which can propagate many feet or even meters if your building wiring has stray return paths. If the hot wire and the return wires are right next to each other (as they should be) and current is flowing, the two magnetic fields will nearly cancel each other out and you will get a small combined magnetic field that fade away to nearly zero in about a foot or about 30 cm. If the wiring is incorrect and current is flowing (even small currents like a lamp), and the current finds a return paths through a different wire or even some metal pipe, you can get large magnetic fields which don't cancel and can be detected many feet or even meters away. So I think an electrician having a look for possible wiring errors (and I understand these are common mistakes) would be wise. I myself am planning to retire from my day job in a few months, so I'll probably call someone out then when I have more time to attack this.

  • if I move my guitar in different directions, I can make the noise disappear, but if I move slightly away the sound comes right back.

    I don't know how things are these days as I've been out of the loop for a loooong time, but back in the day, having to find the ideal location and orientation for the guitar was par for the course.


    These days with fancy "noiseless" pickups and better shielding / materials, I suspect this is less of an issue, but from my POV, 'StratMan, simply recording with the guitar pointed in the "right" direction would be what I'd do.

  • Ah if it were just that simple. Every guitar I have has noiseless pickups. I have shielded every one. I have replaced pickups and wiring in most. I have a drawer full of SCs. I even have a few humbuckers in the drawer where the coils were not balanced closely enough. I have searched for the most noise free profiles. I have been struggling with this for years and years. I stayed at my father-in-laws house for about six months a few years back, and it was like heaven compared to my house. There was a little noise, and you could do the trick like point your guitar in the right direction to minimize it to nearly zero, but when I cam back home I almost cried it's that bad.

  • At home I have a similar humming mostly with crunchy and fuzzy sounds. (with Singlecoil.)
    As far I consider it depends on the distance and angle to my studio monitor.
    Live the distance is bigger so I have no problems.

  • It could be the case that you've got 'noisy' electrical devices elsewhere in the house that are dumping a bunch of EMI crap onto your mains supply. That mains supply then comes to the sockets closest to you and then your guitar pickups are 'hearing' that through the air as well as the regular 50hz / 60hz mains hum. Things that can cause this include dimmer switches, dodgy lights, computers, tv's, fridges, battery chargers etc. I believe the worst culprits tend to be things with a switched mode power supply. Back in the day you just used a transformer. Now a lot of devices such as PC's regulate voltage by switching the mains on and off very, very rapidly. This potentially can cause a bunch of noise on the mains. That's my limited understanding anyway!


    There are power conditioners out there but I've not experimented much to find out how effective they are. I have a power conditioner block that my Kemper and studio gear is plugged into but I still have to sit at a particular angle in my tiny study / studio and then all is well. The angle changes depending on the guitar so now, the mood of a piece changes depending on guitar not just because of the feel of the neck / pickups but also because I'll be facing a different corner ;) I have improved, but not cured, my issue by removing dimmer switches in the house and also finding a rogue fluorescent light bulb. Please note this bulb was NOT in the same room as I play in but it was indeed dumping crap on the mains elsewhere. Removing it cheered things up. I still have other issues that I need to fault find and on my 'to do' list is the following process that I've read about but not yet done....


    To discover if you have a noisy appliance causing the problem..... Simply unplug absolutely everything in the house and turn all the lights off at the fuse board (excludes dimmer circuits). Then plug just your Kemper in and see if that makes your issue any better.


    In theory, you can then get a conditioning mains block and put the offending appliance into that. It should then isolate the issue to that area and not put the crap onto the mains where you are playing. Please note this is my understanding of the theory rather than something I've tried as I've yet to do it :)


    Good luck in finding it :)

  • i just moved into a new building in Brooklyn and the hum is driving crazy ... i bought power conditioner and hum x and pretty much all of these did absolutely nothing to fix my hum problem, just a waste of money. I highly recommend before you rip out all the walls and rewire the entire house get this "Vox amPlug 2 AC30 Headphone Guitar Amp" ... basically it runs on battery and can tell if you our problem is purely EMI in the air and not grounding/wire/or all the other non-sense that you can spend thousands of dollars on identifying. The only solution i found so far is getting Lace Sensor Holy Grail pickups ... they are the only pups that greatly reduced hum for me. Still looking for solutions...

  • I also found a few options in my Kemper to reduce the hum, besides the obvious noise gate check the following:

    1. System > Page 1/18 > Line Frequency: should be set to 50hz (fixed or auto) for Europe (220 volts) or 60hz (fixed or auto) for USA (110 volts)
    2. Input > Clean Sens (i set this to -7.1dB)

    3. Input > Distortion Sens (i set this to -7.1db)

    These help to tame the hum a bit without much tone sacrifice which naturally happens when you crank up the Noise Gate.

  • In addition to the other suggestions on this post, ask your neighbors if they are experiencing similar noise in their devices, if so then the issue is probably not in your house wiring, and may be a faulty power transformer or mains connection. Also moving your guitar to a quieter position has nothing to do with conducted noise, it's a radiated source issue such as fluorescent lights or insufficient shielding in the guitar.

  • You can disconnect the hot wire from your Guitar’s output jack and solder a 470pF cap with one end on the hot wire, and the other onto the jack (placing the cap in series) and then installing a 5.6M ohm resistor from that hot lug to the ground lug (placing the resistor in parallel). This will create a simple passive high pass filter at 60.5hz and eliminate hum.

    Your signal will go down a bit, so you’d maybe need to increase Distortion Sense a little to compensate; though I do variations of this filter on many of my guitars, and haven’t really needed to adjust anything for high gain profiles.