The guitar is question is an Ashton CG-44CEQAM. It has a standard Hi-Z guitar jack socket, plus a microphone style Lo-Z socket , plus a built-in equaliser and tuner. Both sockets produce a similar hummy-hiss sound during DI recording.
What can be done to fix this nonsense?!
There are a couple of good videos on reducing hiss sounds on youtube. There also seem to be a few plug-ins that can take a lot of the white noise out of the track after it is recorded. Your sound there sounds like it might be something in the set up that is just not right. The output seems low yet it sounds like a preamp is cranked way up. I don’t know enough about your specific equipment there to really guess at what it could be.
To my ears that sounds like something’s gone stray - either a wire that’s on the verge of breaking, or a soldered connection that’s about to fail. You might have to check that signal path from guitar to interface. Check the cable, see if another guitar makes that noise with that cable, and if the cable is ok, then I would check the guitar itself.
Already did that. It’s definitely the guitar.
shoot, that’s definitely noisy. Could be a disconnected wire inside somewhere. Can you open it up an look inside?
Sounds like a noisy pot or switch. Jiggle the pots and switches and see if it makes a difference.
Clean the pots using a good quality cleaner like deoxit, make sure the cleaner is safe for plastics.
Well, I would, but there aren’t any.
The only moving ‘electrical’ parts are the buttons, sliders, and a single on the equaliser/tuner.
These look like mechanical potentiometers and switches or are they just electrical rotary position sensors ?
knobs are pots. try try giving them a good twist back and forth for a bit. If it crackles a lot while doing it, it means the swiper on the pot is running over dust. just keep doing it and it should eventually push the dust out of the way. Just make sure not to be too heavy handed with them, because those knobs can be kind of fragile.
My pos Strat copy suffered from this, and it was a disconnected wire in the jack socket, which was an easy fix. You can check the socket and see if the wiring is sound or not.
If you’re semi-confident, you can unscrew the 4 screws on the panel and see the state of the wiring under. As far as I can tell, you’ll have two sets of wires from this module. One will be from the module to the jack socket, and the other set of wires will go to the pickup (which should be under the bridge). Normally the wiring to the pickup will be a thinner shielded wire. If I had to bet a small amount of money, I would say that the wiring to the socket is where the problem lies. If it’s not any of those things, then there will have to be a problem in the pre amp circuit
Yeah, I realised I ws being pretty daft saying there were no moving part. I was just concentrating on Volume/Tone control knobs, of which there are none.
But there is this lot, and of course the equaliser sliders are just a more complicated tone control:
And I should try reading better. The right-most slider is Volume.
Anyway, I got a lot of noise when trying all of them, BUT almost as soon as I moved the left-most slider (Presence) the noise went! So, I reckon @bozmillar was right about some dust getting involved.
Thanks, all.
