Dean Markley Guitar Pickup - Buzz Problem

[Brent Evans]

I've had a couple of these Dean Markley acoustic soundhole pickups show up at the event I'm running over the last week, and I know they'll show up again in the next week.

They sound great... but they've got a bad case of the buzzies. It's not straight 60hz hum, but it shows up around 122 and 244 (harmonics?) and as a presence lift over about 3 octaves centered at 2.5k or so.

Has anyone successfully killed the hums and buzzes on these things? All I can find via Google is how hum free they're supposed to be. :rolleyes:

[ronmac]

My experience with that type of pickup has not been good. They are very high impedance and low output, so the preamp they go into needs to be up to the task. A Baggs Para DI or SansAmp Para Driver Preamp/DI (designed for high impedance piezo style pickups) works much better than going into a regular DI.

[beau]

The wood looking ones are single coil and will pick up every hum and buzz in the room. Much like a strat with one pickup selected.

[Brent Evans]

That's the ones.

Oh well.. you can only do what you can do. One of them isn't an issue.. there's a seperate internal pickup that works well enough for rhythm playing. The other will only be for one more night, and it shall just be what it is, unless someone cues me onto a magically-eliminates-all-the-hummy-buzzy-hissys-box or some such thing.

[Butch Bos]

Hi Brent
The Gate can be you best friend in this situation

Butch

[Bill Park]

Not being familiar with that model, I looked it up. There are a few models, and one of them is a single coil, while the remainder of the offerings are humbucking.


Therefore, there are two answers (by answer, I mean a way to solve the problem rather than hide it. Bust sometimes you have no choice but to put makeup on the ugly baby....turn on the gate).

Since the pickups are known to be of decent quality, if we are talking about the single coil model, something on or around the stage is inducing hum into them. That should be easy to detect and correct.

The humbucking model should not buzz, and since you've run into the problem with more than one of them, we need to look for other commonalities. These are not powered pickups, so induced noise has to be coming from something else...a powered DI, a shield problem, whatever.

[beau]

Back when I was in retail, the wood ones were single coil. The humbuckers were black with gold lettering. That may have changed as it's been 20 years. One cool feature was that they used Bill Lawrence cable and connectors. It's a brass 1/4" plug with a screw on the side. Loosen the screw, cut an inch of cable, push the connector back onto the cable and tighten the scew to repair.

[Brent Evans]

Checked tonight, and they are the single coil models. That being the case, it's most likely the proximity to all manner of electrical madness. This is a country camp meeting church service in a a brush arbor tabernacle - there are ceiling fans, bug zappers, florescent lights, halogen lights, transformers, adapters, well pumps... you name it. And 90% of it is not under my control.

Looks like a gate it shall be.

[Wink0r]

Lacking Neon the bug zapper would be my first suspect.

[Brent Evans]

Lacking Neon the bug zapper would be my first suspect.

Awww... bug zappers and camp meetin' go together like Baptists and fried chicken!

From Sunday night. (http://www.4shared.com/video/pmzykjxn/BugZapper_Incident.html).. you can hear the bugzapper starting at about 0:30. Incidentally.. the guitar with the offending pickup is visible also.