check to see the pickups haven’t been jarred loose a little
If it eliminates your chords that's definitely going to be a big problem. ;)
Sounds like your wireless gizmo is a V/UHF FM tranmitter rather than a digital type, because with digital you might hear broken-up or “pixelated” audio but not hiss. Hiss in an FM system means there’s not enough signal strength from the transmitter to fully quiet the receiver, just like when you’re tuned to a distant FM station. Putting your hand on the strings probably acted to couple a bit more signal, thus the hiss went away. So I’d say you have found the problem and corrected it.
Sounds like the ground wire got knocked loose when the guitar was dropped. The instrument should be grounded to the stud of the stop tailpiece with a wire going through a small hole in the control cavity.
Thelmannn wire.
As a fellow Les Paul owner who also happens to own two Fender Strats, am Epiphone Casino, Tele, and Rick 325, I can’t than you enough for the nice little diversion from the cares of the world!
Guitar pinglist ping.
It requires disassembly of the guitar (An opportunity to set your action lower if need be) and the Buzz Kill is used to line the pocket beneath the pickups and any other areas including spaces around the output jack.
The stuff is a 4" wide roll of thin copper sheeting with an adhesive backing. Worked like a charm for me. YMMV.
This is making me think I need to find a project guitar one of these days - currently I have a PRS CE24 and a MIM Fender Strat. Both have the bridge upblocked, and I shielded the pickup cavity in the Strat and swapped in Texas Special pickups.
OTOH, I still need to replace my amplifier with one that sounds good at lower volumes since I just play in my spare room these days.
I’m an electrical engineer. From my experience you have noise on the power supply. A higher quality amp would probably solve the hiss.
Possible the wireless system has a noise gate which cuts the signal when you’re not playing, so you don’t hear the natural noise of the guitar.
hiss would not normally be a grounding / shielding issue.
does the guitar have a built in preamp or any effects inside it?
( i realize that no original les paul would have that )
if there are no electronics in the git-fiddle, measure the resistance of the pickups from the jack. i don’t know what it should be with the switches in this or that position, but i wonder if it will measure way too high
didn’t read your entire post. did you try other instruments into the same cable / boxes / amp ?
oh. one more thing. ram the cord plug in and out of the jack a couple hundred times. a bit of corrosion on the inner conductor connector in the jack can cause noise. (though it usually will be crackly and random)
I worked hard on getting the “right” hiss.It’s an essential part of my tone!!!
Marko
You have a grounding problem in the guitar.
If you’d like to send it to me I’ll be happy to repair it for you.
;)
You could also filter the input power. There are a lot of power filters out there. It could make a big difference.
I’ve had a few Les Pauls including a 1969 Custom a.k.a ‘the Fretless Wonder”. None of them ever hissed. I currently have two all mahogany Studios that I had my guy rewire with Tone Man kits including Bournes 500K pots and Russian PIO caps and vintage wire. They both are dead quiet, even the one with made-in-Korea P-90’s that cost $15 a piece. An experiment in frugality since I got the guitar for just ovr $300 due to a cracked and repaired headstock. I mess with my own guitars when something goes wrong and hiss is always a grounding problem. If it hums and the hum goes away when you touch the strings, it’s not grounded properly. Now some of the P-90 equipped guitars will hum no matter what. Turn it up enough and you won’t hear the hum. I remember going to see Eric Johnson and a real young Derek Trucks at a local club on a weekday night in 2000. I wanted to see Derek since a friend gave me a bootleg tape of him but had never heard of Eric Johnson. So Eric is setting up his gear and has an old sunburst Strat and when he plugs it in, it’s all 60 cycle hum and I think this guy is a loser. Later I read that Eric did all his own wiring. Anyway, I was primed to exit the hall because of the hum. I stuck around to give him a chance. The group was his Alien Love Child trio with just bass and drums. They start their first song and I never heard any hum until it was over. He was plugged into two 50 watt Marshall Plexis and it was overwhelming but sublime.
You could check that the ground on the cable connects all the way.
Commas are our friends.
i don’t use wireless, but i ran into a similar problem with my Telecaster after i had customization work done on it. It seems that the “functional alcoholic” who did the work neglected to place the ground wire from the new bridge to the ground in the control cavity.
i never liked the idea of a direct ground from the strings to the amp, so i added my own feature. Using a small alligator clip connected to one of the intonation screws on the strat non-tremmello bridge i had put in, i ran a small wire to an axial lead 10WV 100 micro-Farad capacitor and using a small ring terminal, mounted the other end to a mounting screw on the selector switch. That gave me an AC ground, but not a direct DC ground path. If i run into a problem grabbing a mike that is grounded to the opposite polarity, it would blow the cap, breaking the connection and saving my life.
The Tele still hums and buzzes, but it’s a TELECASTER, they do that. i could clean things up a bit and eliminate some of that with shielding and better solder joints, but it seems to work fine without it.
As for your situation, cables can be a problem. USUALLY you end up losing higher frequency response (hiss) due to the cumulative capacitance of the cable. Cheaper cables have higher capacitance/unit length. The longer the cable, the greater the higher frequency loss. i have a cheap 25’ cable that makes the tone control in my Tele useless. It is that bad. Some manufactures do make “active” cables to compensate cable capacitance. How are the connections to the plugs of the cable?
More to the point, if you’re getting hum or hiss that goes away when you touch the strings, there is a connection problem somewhere in the guitar. The strings are acting as an antenna picking up white noise. The strings should be grounded to the bridge, which is in turn grounded to the guitar. i do not know where that connection would be on a Les Paul, since i’ve never owned one.
The capacitor i use can be mounted internally so that you don’t mar the look of a very beautiful instrument. i kinda like the way the fix looks on my Tele, so it isn’t an issue to me. However, that’s only if you’re worried about a direct DC connection between your body and the guitar. Most people don’t worry about it.