Awful feedback 60 cycle hum, please help!

  • Hey guys, I have an MH-1000 with Seymour Duncan HB pickups that was bought new back in the day. I have a real bad what I am assuming is feedback issue with the my guitar audio, which I am assuming the pickups or wiring inside the guitar is the issue based on my diagnoses... So I tried playing the guitar with new analogue cables, also with my Peavy 6505+ amp, and also with my Kemper Profiler with both analogue and SPDIF connections, and also through an interface with BIAS FX, the audio issue persists with all of these examples in the same manner, meaning the constant variable here is the guitar, or something in my bedroom affecting the audio? At this point the only fix I can find is to set a noise gate to 6+ to eliminate the hum which is extremely high and I would prefer to fix the root of the issue. Should I buy new pickups? Or take it to guitar center or something to get checked out? Or maybe just buy a new guitar? Please help!

    https://drive.google.com/file/…RtAWDTYk/view?usp=sharing

    Here is a video sample of the Peavy 6505+ audio


    https://drive.google.com/file/…fsjlGVOR/view?usp=sharing

    Here is an example of the Kemper audio


  • With the guitar plugged in.... turn the volume pot of the guitar all the way down.


    Does the hum disappear? If it does, it is airborne interference. If the hum stays, you may have a ground loop (lots of info online about those).


    If it's airborne, try the following:-


    1. Move to different parts of the room where you play with your guitar. Face the guitar in different directions. Hopefully something obvious will strike you that could be the cause of the hum. You might find you can face a certain way to play / record and suddenly your problem is tollerable.


    2. Investigate obvious sources of airborne interference. These can include:-

    Fluorescent lights / old style energy saving light bulbs. New style LED bulbs tend to be OK (or I've had good luck anyway!)

    Dimmer switches. Especially cheap ones. Replace with on / off switches or play in the dark!

    Computers (some motherboards are ridiculously noisy because of how they do power throttling to save energy. Works great for the environment but unfortunately can really upset guitar pickups

    Computer monitor

    Some 'brick' / wall wart chargers


    3. Investigate things in other rooms. It's possible for a fridge that is 'electrically noisy' to put a bunch of buzz onto the mains in your house. Then every other wire in the walls acts like a transmitter. There are clean plugs you can get which you can plug the offending appliance into to try and help with this.


    There are many possibles. Hope you find what the issue is as hum can drive you nuts.

  • So the PC for sure causes "some" of the hum which gets better or worse depending on how close I am to it. I had already known that before hand and moved it away which fixed a lot of it but I still am getting what you heard in the videos. However the Peavy amp for example is not even close to the PC to the point where I don't think the PC would affect it and as you can hear the audio issue is exactly the same... So that leads me to believe that the electricity wiring in my house could just be bad in someway?

  • the humming which stops when you touch the guitar is normal for a properly grounded guitar. However, I wouldn’t expect it to happen when the guitar volume is turned off. It definitely sounds like a grounding or power issue. It sounds like you are in the US. I know you guys often seem to have issues with dirty power which we rarely have in the UK and Europe. Many people in the US seem to feel a power conditioner is an absolute necessity whereas in the UK they are rarely used.


    Do you still get the same problem with the Kemper connected to nothing else (listening on headphones)? If yes do you still get it in a different room? A different building? You are trying to isolate whether the problem is specific to the Kemper or to your room.