Zed A. Shaw, Painter

You see, electrical wiring and things like fluorescent light bulbs hit guitar pickups and cause a 60hz (mhz?) hum (although I think that's different with 220v and is 50?). What a humbucker does is it has two magnets of reverse polarity, so that each pickup has this hum reversed.

So you have two pickups, you put their signal together, they each have a 60 cycle hum BUT those very regular cycles are inverted with each other, and then cancel each other out. It works like noise canceling headphones do. If the magnets have same polarity this doesn't happen.

On my guitar I have two humbuckers and a single coil in the middle. I want my switching to coil tap and combine these humbuckers so that their coils work in different combos, BUT, are all hum canceling. Except, dammit the manufacturer wired the neck pickup backwards.

I know it's backwards because they specifically made the neck and bridge to be a pair, and they paired up the neck's coils to match the bridges exactly, which then make it impossible to coil tap both and combine them. What's irritating about this is all they do is make magnets.

Now I finally figure all this shit out, and reverse engineer their screw up, and figure out how to reverse the wiring to get the hum canceling I want across all the pickups, and I solder it all right, and I put my soldering iron away, and it seems to work. Great.

Then I touch the bridge ground. The bridge has a wire that connects to your body to ground the electronics and make it silent, except now it's going BZZZZZZZZZTT. WTF now I have a ground loop? This was last night and I gave up trying to find it until today.

Today I disconnect the neck and I try to find this buzz and it's gone. Great, so I turn the soldering iron on and reconnect the neck, and then try it and DAMMIT THE GROUND LOOP IS BACK I HATE YOU ELECTRONICS! I disconnect it again and search more, and nothing. WTF?

This is where the programmer in me comes out. I decide that I'm going to have to try out every combination or wiring to find this ground loop, so I take my already small wires and I solder on 1-pin connectors so I can randomly connect them. I do this, and the buzz goes away!

Awesome, so I figure out the humbucking wiring and get it all working, then I go to solder it back together again, turn the soldering iron on, and DIE YOU PIECE OF SHIT THE BUZZ IS BACK! Ok, so I am going nuts now, I look at another wiring I did and there's a small difference.

Turn the soldering iron off (are you figuring this out yet?) and remove two wires going to ground, combine them, with just my hand, and it works, no buzz. Great! Ok so it was that one wire. I turn the soldering iron on, and solder that single wire in place of the two wires....

Put the soldering iron back, go to test AND THE BUZZ IS BACK. ARRRTGGGGG. I use the soldering iron to detach the wire again, and turn the iron off, then hold the wire and no buzz. I'm dying here. WTF, I hate you. I hold the wire there, it works, I keep my hand there....

I reach for the soldering iron, turn it on, and buzz. Turn it off. Buzz stops. ohhhh you motherfucker iron on. buzz. iron off. NO BUZZ. Then I figure it out. This iron is kind of a shitty electric iron, and it must have no shielding at all so it's a noisy POS.

So I was thinking that I had a ground loop but it was the soldering iron being electric, shitty, and pointed right at my pickups was causing insane electrical interference, and my putting my hand on the bridge ground was actually just changing it not stopping it.