The Song Fight Bulletin Board

How do you deal with the hiss coming from the amp sims? The noise gate works after the note is played, but there is hiss while its playing, plus it seems to tamper with the "natural" tonality. What do you do to fix this situation? If anything?

The hiss is likely from your guitar. Turn down the input.

Rewire the building that you live in so that you have nice clean electricity. Yay! Barring that, not much you can do, just noise gate, volume envelopes on your sound clips, etc. I bought an Electro-Harmonix "Hum Debugger" pedal which claims to be able to eliminate hum without coloring your tone. Total baloney, the thing a) did not eliminate hum and b) colored the bejeezus out of my tone. So don't buy one of those!

Oh god, I've lived in some noisy ass buildings. My last house wasn't grounded and there was some crazy interference. Everything I owned that made noise electrically sounded like shit. Luckily my new place is a little better. Although, I'm right next door to a park, so ambient noise is a problem.

y'all need to read more carefully. he said noise from the amp SIMS. the ones everybody just told him to try.

Are you sure it's not just the particular amp simulators you are using? A lot of old 60s tube amps were famous for their dirty hum, buzz, white noise, etc.

Also, if you are running compression in your chain after the amp sim, that will accentuate the low level sounds.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Are you sure it's not just the particular amp simulators you are using? A lot of old 60s tube amps were famous for their dirty hum, buzz, white noise, etc.

Also, if you are running compression in your chain after the amp sim, that will accentuate the low level sounds.

This is true, but the hum/hiss will be worse if you're not getting a clean signal from the guitar. It's entirely possible that you're hearing the amp sim adding some amplification and distortion to some natural ground hum that hadn't been noticeable before you started experimenting with amp sims.

Do you have multiple sets of pickups on your guitar? Is the hum better or worse if you switch between them? Does it get better or worse if you mute the strings with your hand? These would be signs that the signal from the guitar isn't coming in clean. Does the same problem affect multiple different guitars? If so, that might point to bad programming or some extra noise getting introduced somewhere in the recording chain.

Hiss and hum are different things.

Hum is generally caused by bad or failing power supplies in your amplifier (capacitors dry out after a few decades); by electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from house wiring or appliance cords being picked up by: the guitar circuitry (usually); poorly shielded guitar or mic cables; or pre-amp-stage amplifier circuits . The remedy is often as simple as turning your guitar or amp, or both, to a different angle relative to the walls.

If I understand, hum is not the problem here.

Hiss, or noise, is generally caused by resistor noise (which is to say, deflected electrons bouncing around randomly inside the resistors in your guitar and amp), or by poor impedance matching (which is to say, deflected electrons bouncing around randomly when they hit the wall of the high-impedance end of a connection, after sailing smoothly through the low-impedance end, or so I have been led to believe).

The former kind of hiss is unavoidable, but is generally only a problem under high amplification, at which extreme it is thoroughly swamped by the sound you do want to hear (the signal). The latter kind can be remedied to some extent by direct boxes.

It's true, though, that some amp sims simulate every detail of the amp, including its hum and noise. It's also true that compression, by increasing low-level sounds, can bring ordinary background resistor hiss prominently into the foreground in the absence of signal.

JB- Yea, the bridge pickup turned out to be quieter, and that combined with zero gain on my M Track seemed to do the trick, resulting in much cleaner sound and thus less hiss when it came time to throw on the amp sims. Thanks for the great advice!