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Just a quick one, I think the solution is simple, but I'm just a little bit slow haha.

My board is rather large, and the other day i tried adding a big muff pi to it; albeit on the floor next to it. When running from battery power it's fine, but when I plugged it into the daisy chain, an odd ticking came out of my amp. I powered it from a onespot using the 3.5mm adapter from johnnyshredfreak. I know ehx pedals are the opposite ground to normal boss pedals, so is this why the pedal ticks? Is the polarity of the adapter wrong? Do I need a power isolator to run it properly? Or am I possibly powering too many pedals from my onespot?

It's not vital that I power it from the board as I have a dream box where the muff sound is similar, I'd just like to practice with it every now and then without worrying about batteries.

Any help is appreciated

Jack

I've had this happen a few times, but usually it's something near the guitars pickups... but could be the same near the power supply....

....Watches / Mobile Phones / computers & their power supplies. Thought it worthy of a mention.

I've heard about ticking noises coming from the one spot when you use too many pedals. I have a similar problem from my Johnnyshredfreak power supply every so often, so I might eventually upgrade to a Voodoolab PP2+ if I suddenly find myself a bit better off.

take it all apart, and start adding the pieces back in, one by one.

find the offending part

Thanks for the tips so far.

The ticking only rears its head when the big muff is powered by the onespot. With battery power it's fine.

As for outside things affecting the pickups, I don't wear a watch :p and my phone doesn't make the weird noises phones make except when sat on my amp, so I don't put it there :p

I think it must be the onespot being overloaded or something, which is a pain :p

Thanks again

the power supply can only supply a certain amount of micro amps so if you exceed this you will get issues, each pedal draws off a certain amount and things like delays and modulation pedals draw a lot more. The one spot is rated at 1700mA max so add up all the draw for your pedals and see what you get.

What else are you powering? Guess you need to make sure you've got enough current from the JSFREAK. Though I think it's 3000ma which is a fair whack.

as an added note, I had issues with ehx pedals and the one spot with unwanted noise. I now use it to power a couple of other pedals seperately and the JSF one for the main daisy chain.

This is the best pic I have of my board at the minute:


It powers them all except the black star, plus a memory toy, boss tu3 and a Dunlop wah.
I wouldn't have thought the mA rating would matter too much because I only use 2 or 3 at once tops. I know a long daisy chain can cause. voltage drops, but I haven't extended it to power the big muff pi any more so than it already was.

A head scratcher for sure :p

batsbrew wrote:take it all apart, and start adding the pieces back in, one by one.

find the offending part

A much quicker method (depending on the size of the board) for doing that is to put the guitar cable halfway through. Then you can isolate half of the board in one test rather than test pedals individually.

Yeah, I usually do the opposite of trying it one bit at a time: I go through the path plugging into one less pedal each time, basically.

90% of the time I have a noise from a pedal it's from using an AC adapter with my board's 9v supply against it's wishes. I've never had a problem with the EHX minijack cords, but the 9v battery clip cord I used to power my older Vox wah made things REALLY noisy, and my Dano French Toast goes ENGNENNENENNENENGNNENGNENGNENNENEEE on the octave fuzz mode if you use the pedalboard power supply with it.

With that many pedals, you definitely need to look into an isolated power supply.

Pedal order can also be a noise contributor. Certain pedals can be really picky where you put them.

Which Big Muff are you using?

Yar, more supplies should do the trick. I've had similar trouble with boss loopstation, the EHX SMM/H, and Ravish Sitar. I've also always got an Eau Claire THunder in the rig... the thing has a tendancy to help noise along...
I think the last time I was having enough trouble to do anything about it, I just subbed in a dedicated Boss supply to my loopstation, or the "official" ehx plugs for the ehx pedal.

taylornutt wrote:With that many pedals, you definitely need to look into an isolated power supply.

Pedal order can also be a noise contributor. Certain pedals can be really picky where you put them.

Which Big Muff are you using?

A Big Muff Pi, not sure what model it constitutes as, there seem to be thousands.
It's a reissue though, bought it from eaun here a few weeks ago, looks like this:


Soon to be rehoused though, the box is huge for such a small PCB

I think I'll get myself another onespot; I've had this one for a couple of years with no problems, so I'm sure halving it's load will give me a few more years of hassle free power.