If you are experiencing buzzing with your guitar or bass, it helps to break the noise into the correct category before diagnosing the issue. There are two primary types of Buzz you can encounter:

1. 60-Cycle Hum
2. Buzz caused by a bad ground connection

Let’s break them down:

60-Cycle Hum is a common phenomenon with Single Coil Pickups, and depending on your environment, it can be mild to severe. Causes of 60-Cycle Hum include computer monitors, cell phones, dimmer switches, radio towers, and bad electrical wiring in your house.

Furthermore, it’s not just the pickups that can pick up 60-cycle hum, but your cables, pedals, and amp can also pick up the buzz. If you use a lot of pedals, including compression and distortion or overdrive pedals, expect the noise floor to be worse when turning the pedal on.

To verify that you are experiencing a 60-cycle hum, sit in an office chair that can swivel and slowly rotate around your room while holding the guitar plugged into your amp. You should notice the hum is worse at some points in the room than others – this is normal.

Steps to mitigate 60-cycle hum:

1. Add shielding to the guitar’s electronic cavities
2. Change amp position – placing your amp directly against the wall can pick up 60-cycle hum
3. Change the angle at which you sit and play in your room to find the spots where the hum is the least prevalent.
4. Upgrading your cables can help reduce the noise floor of your signal chain
5. While not ideal tonally speaking, a noise gate pedal can help in extreme situations

You can describe the symptoms of Buzz caused by a faulty ground circuit as follows:

1. Persistent buzz regardless of sitting position
2. Louder buzz, not like 60-Cycle Hum
3. Touching metal parts on the guitar causes the noise to drop in volume or completely disappear

Buzz caused by ground issues is common, especially with novice technicians not well-versed in guitar wiring. In this scenario, at least one metal part on the guitar is not grounded correctly. The leading causes of this issue are a cold solder joint or loose wire. Ground issues can be quite simple to fix if you understand how to hunt them down. Check out our article on finding and fixing ground issues here: