Extremely noisy Jazzmaster...

avj · Post by **avj** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 5:19 pm

A week ago, I acquired a Classic Player Jazzmaster. As the pickups in my Classic Player Jaguar were the source of much grief, I figured I'd give the JM stock pickups a brief shot; unsurprisingly, I hated them.

I ordered a set of AV '62 JM pickups from Darren Riley and set aside some time on Friday evening to install them. The leads were very poorly soldered to the pickups, so I cleaned them up and reworked the mess. (I also want to take a second and state how ridiculous and fucking annoying the lead-free RoHS nonsense is. Thankfully, the entire industry I work in is deathly afraid of tin whiskers and has no plans to go lead-free anytime soon.) After that I checked their resistance and both were around 8.4K ohms, as they were before the rework. Great great.

I wired them in, checked for all the proper grounds while everything was still accessible, screwed the pickups in, put a few screws in the pickguard, and plugged it in to test. There was an extremely annoying buzz going on in both the neck-only and bridge-only positions, while the middle position was dead quiet. It's not the typical single-coil 60-cycle hum I'm used to, and compared to the similarly-wired Jaguar, the JM is a buzz factory. It's loud enough that with moderate gain from an SD-1, the buzz level is equal to my playing.

I'm going to try shielding the thing a little better per Curtis Novak's instructions in a thread on that other forum, but I have little confidence in the procedure actually doing anything. It's not the kind of buzz that goes away when touching the strings or the bridge -- this is a full-on Roman hornet orgy. I opened it back up and rechecked all the grounds per both Fender's and Duncan's diagrams, and everything seems kosher. I came across some posts elsewhere that said some of these guitars had a bad bridge ground, but there's good continuity between the bridge and ground. Running a lead directly from the bridge itself to any ground point does absolutely nothing.

So I guess the big question here is, "What the fuck?" I don't remember the much-hotter stock pickups being this bad, so I'm going to put them back in briefly for the sake of troubleshooting before I ship them off to serfx. If the stock ones are perfectly quiet, I guess that would answer the question and point the finger at something askew with the new set.

Any insight would be fantastic.

dezb1 · Post by **dezb1** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 5:31 pm

Iâ€™m afraid Iâ€™ve got no productive input to your problem, but Iâ€™d like to see picâ€™s of said jazzmaster

avj · Post by **avj** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 5:37 pm

dezb1 wrote:Iâ€™m afraid Iâ€™ve got no productive input to your problem, but Iâ€™d like to see picâ€™s of said jazzmaster

I've only taken the one for now, and it's linked via the words Classic Player Jazzmaster in the above post. Somehow every damn guitar I own is now sunburst, just by sheer chance of how I came about them. I would really like to paint over this with an Olympic White or Surf Green, but at this point I'd be happy to play it without incident.

dezb1 · Post by **dezb1** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:20 pm

nice guitar I like it as it is

Mages · Post by **Mages** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:37 pm

very odd. I remember my stock mij jazz was remarkably quiet for a single coil guitar. I can't remember if it got louder after I installed an aftermarket pickup.

SKC Willie · Post by **SKC Willie** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:40 pm

Mages wrote:very odd. I remember my stock mij jazz was remarkably quiet for a single coil guitar. I can't remember if it got louder after I installed an aftermarket pickup.

word. I thought jazzys were supposed to be fairly noisy because of the pickups but that thing was QUIET.

taylornutt · Post by **taylornutt** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:49 pm

What is the output for the Stock CP Jazz pickups? You mentioned that the AV pups you had both measured 8.4k which seems hot to me. I put Lindy Fralin Texas Special Jazzmaster pups in my Jagmaster and the neck was 8.4k and bridge was 9.4k. What is the normal output for AVRI pups?

avj · Post by **avj** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:52 pm

taylornutt wrote:What is the output for the Stock CP Jazz pickups? You mentioned that the AV pups you had both measured 8.4k which seems hot to me. I put Lindy Fralin Texas Special Jazzmaster pups in my Jagmaster and the neck was 8.4k and bridge was 9.4k. What is the normal output for AVRI pups?

I'm not sure what the stock guys were. Going from memory, the AV pickups were ~8.3-8.4K -- but I'll measure them all again when I get home tonight.

The plan of attack is to record some audio of how the AV pickups currently sound, take them out, put the stock pickups back in and record some audio of how much they buzz, then take them out and assess what to do. If the stock guys buzz just as bad, I'm going to just rip out and replace the entire wiring harness and shield everything; if they sound fine and don't buzz as bad, that would indicate to me there's some problem with one or both of the AV pickups and I'll troubleshoot from there. I just really think I would have remembered if the stock pickups buzzed this bad.

blacktaxi · Post by **blacktaxi** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:17 pm

Some nice shielding won't hurt. I'm not sure what your problem is, but properly shielding a guitar had never failed me.

hotrodperlmutter · Post by **hotrodperlmutter** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:50 pm

bah, i thought this thread was about this:

taylornutt · Post by **taylornutt** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 9:10 pm

taylornutt wrote:What is the output for the Stock CP Jazz pickups? You mentioned that the AV pups you had both measured 8.4k which seems hot to me. I put Lindy Fralin Texas Special Jazzmaster pups in my Jagmaster and the neck was 8.4k and bridge was 9.4k. What is the normal output for AVRI pups?

My Jazzmaster pickups were slightly hotter than stock but the only noise I ever experienced was due to the 3 way switch. Definitely do a demo and I can maybe figure it out for you. Make sure and test all the pups to make sure you are getting a signal and make sure the wires are not touching anything that would ground them out. My Baja Tele was grounding out and the pickup switch was touching the shielding paint inside the cavity

johnnyseven · Post by **johnnyseven** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:38 am

I had one of my JM's shielded and it is now quiet as a mouse. Before it was shielded my EHX 22 Caliber made so much noise it was bordering on being unusable, but now there is no buzz at all. Sounds like you may have a different problem though.

avj · Post by **avj** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 3:15 pm

johnnyseven wrote:I had one of my JM's shielded and it is now quiet as a mouse. Before it was shielded my EHX 22 Caliber made so much noise it was bordering on being unusable, but now there is no buzz at all. Sounds like you may have a different problem though.

I figure since I'll have it apart I'm just going to shield the piss out of everything. The reason I'm not so optimistic is that I can't seem to make the buzz go away no matter what.

I didn't get a chance to dick with the Jazzmaster last night thanks to Valentine's Day, but the pleasant trade-off was seeing a friend's band open for Deerhoof at my favorite local venue.

Tonight it's back to business.

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 4:47 pm

AVJ - I have no idea on your problem but you're my Brother-in-anality and want to give you my verbal support in this quest.

It does strike me as odd that there should be more buzzing than before though so with my limited electrics knowledge I'd kinda assume a ground is disconnected somewhere.... but yeah I know shit all about this stuff.

taylornutt · Post by **taylornutt** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 5:46 pm

hotrodperlmutter wrote:bah, i thought this thread was about this:

When those guitars first came out, I thought they were ugly. But I am really starting to dig the black headstocks and the satin colors. While I am not a big user of the rhythm circuit, it still feels ackward when it's not there. It doesn't fell like a Jazzmaster without it. I want to make a Jagblaster Deluxe out of a black Jaguar HH or the Blacktop Jag HH. It would also be interesting to drop a WRHB in the Blacktop Jazzmaster.

Mages · Post by **Mages** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:14 pm

yeah, I like the black headstocks too. reminds me of the contemporary series

lorez · Post by **lorez** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:19 pm

I recently played one of the Lee ranaldo ones and was impressed by it. I think they have discontinued the series as well

serfx · Post by **serfx** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:35 pm

lorez wrote:I recently played one of the Lee ranaldo ones and was impressed by it. I think they have discontinued the series as well

i'm not sure about the discontinuation as it is still on fender.com

however i did notice the price drop at one of my local shops.. if its still kicking about in a couple months i may pick it up.

--
on topic
--
shield the hell out of it, and good luck man, take your time, i'm in no rush need of the pickups.

avj · Post by **avj** » Thu Feb 17, 2011 7:52 pm

I'm happy to report that the problem is solved, but I have no useful root cause information. I dropped the stock pickups back in and the buzz was still present. I didn't have time to dick around so I just went the brute-force route by ripping everything apart and rewiring the son of a bitch. I roughed up the back of the pots which hopefully increased the conductivity a little and I also removed as much of the lead-free solder (which has a much higher melting point) as I could from everywhere, as I really dislike working with it.

There was a marked improvement during both home testing and at rehearsal last night. I've grabbed some 1-mil (.001") aluminum foil that I'm going to use in conjunction with spray adhesive to shield the pickguard and cavities, hopefully helping reduce the buzz even more.

Another quick note: I suspect I'm in the minority, but I really love and make great use of the strangle switch on the Jaguar. It's something I was thinking of adding to this Jazzmaster at some point, but I had an idea while I was rewiring. I decided to swapped the leads on the neck pickup (hot to ground, ground to hot), which places it out of phase with the bridge and results in a nice thin sound -- not unlike a Jag with the strangle switch on. (Mustang owners are way ahead of me on this.) I'm going to return it to in-phase when I put the shielding on, but I'll be adding a DPDT switch to flip the phase at will as soon as I find one lying around.

Dave wrote:AVJ - I have no idea on your problem but you're my Brother-in-anality and want to give you my verbal support in this quest.

I appreciate the metaphorical firm-but-gentle hand on my inner thigh. It's what got me through all of this.

serfx: I'll be shipping the pickups out tomorrow -- hopefully you'll enjoy them.