Old wiring= 60 cycle hum= I go nuts

[Ptron]

I've been using my apartment as a studio. I'm lucky enough to live above a vacant store. Plus my roomates are either in my band or very tolerant.

Anyways, it's working out beatifully except for horrendous hum. Mostly from the guitars & bass but sometimes it comes through the monitors too. Yes, my guitars have single coil pick ups but I sheilded the shit out of them and don't have this problem elsewhere. I've read some stuff on this and heard that the ancient wiring in my apt may be the culprit. But I haven't read why, or what can be done about it, short of tearing out the walls and re-wiring the joint. Obviously, with the old wiring, there are no grounds. It occured to me that this might be the problem and perhaps a temporary ground could be set up. I can't see how it could hurt but I'm wary of trying it without some confirmation.

There IS one outlet with a ground. I checked it out w/ a voltmeter and did find current from the ground to the hot. I don't trust that it's actually properly grounded though and I don't know how to tell. When I used this outlet to plug my amp into, there was no improvement at all.

Please help if you can. Otherwise I'll go nuts.

[Jon X]

Just a piece of advice: Speaking from experience trying to work on the electrical system in a house, if you aren't an electrician I'd suggest hiring one to come out and tell you what you've got, and what can be done about it. I learned the hard way not to mess with electricity, and it's worth $200 or so everytime I move into a new place to have an electrician come out and run a new circuit or rewire stuff when necessary.

Maybe it's possible to run a new circuit from the switchbox with better, more modern wiring and put some outlets on it, separate from the rest of the apartment. The old wiring could stay, and you would have all your equipment for recording isolated from other electrical devices in the house. I'm not all that sure how the switchbox would be setup in an old building like that, so you might not be able to improve anything without upgrading the entire place. Again, an electrician could probably tell you in about 15 minutes if any of this is possible.

[Ric]

One interesting source of line noise is
from common light dimmers. You know the slide or rotary type that make bulbs dim or bright. They all introduce "Hum" and the only way to rid of it is to lose the dimmers.

Just thought I'd mention that because I had that very problem and an elctrician informed me of this anomolie.

[Ptron]

I rent, so I can't really do much to change the wiring. There are no dimmer switches in our apartment. It occurs to me that the vacant store below might have flourescent lighting. They are very slowly turning it into a coffee shop and I think they sometimes leave it on.

Nope. I just checked. The lights are off and the hum is still there. I could live with gating it, except that it's so bad that it becomes clearly audible during quiet or sustained parts. Sometimes I like to use alot of fuzz and then I'ts nearly impossible to gate because the headroom between signal and noise is almost zero!

Anyways, I'm not an electrician but I am a maintenance guy so I do know something about it. At least I could probably set up a common ground for everything. I just don't know if that would help.

[This message has been edited by Ptron (edited 04-24-2000).]

[Ptron]

Thanks for the advice Sonusman but I think I may have misused the term "60 cycle hum". The buzz I'm getting through my monitors comes and goes and is relatively minor. Also, It doesn't show up in the recordings so might be a power amp thing.

It's really the hum from the guitars and bass that's giving me a headache. I've seen those devices that claim to "condition" the power. Is this the kind of situation they're for?