Rick Humbuckers and/or shielding in 4003

[walrus]

My 4003 can be quite noisy and I have been debating installing HB1s. How do these sound, pretty close to the hi-gains or completely different beast?

I purchased the EHX Hum Debugger and it works great but there's still a strange hissing in my house and some bar situations. Could be lousy wiring as the house is old. What about shielding? Anyone have luck with that?

[jps]

Are you sure the hissing is not the amp producing this? Do you cabinets have tweeters/horns in them?

[coolhandjjl]

What's in your signal chain? Any EQ's, effects pedals, etc? I had a bad Boss that always hissed. Perhaps a bad guitar cable, Furman power strip on the fritz? That's where I'd be looking.

Humbuckers have a darker, fuller tone, drawbacks are less articulation. Very different from what's in there now.

The only noise a 4003 has been known to make is an occasional 60hz hum, but very quietly. For those who don't like that, the RWRP* bridge pickup mod takes care of that.

But never a hissing reported.

* Reverse Wire Reverse Polarity. Search the forum for details.

[cassius987]

Are you sure the hissing is not the amp producing this? Do you cabinets have tweeters/horns in them?

+1, if your tweeter is all the way up, you'll get some pretty nasty hiss that's audible when you aren't playing. The "hum" that HB-1s and RWRP cure is a low pitch, like the starting bass note of "One Of These Days" by Pink Floyd but stretched out and distorted without the timbre/ADSR of a bass guitar. You can probably get an idea of it by just getting a sound wave generator to play you 60 Hz with infinite sustain.

Shielding has to be totally continuous to work and even then it won't block low frequencies which are 90% of the problem. I only do it because I'm that obsessive, not because I think it's all that beneficial...

[nukebass]

My DCM is terribly noisy. My only solution was to buy the same pedal and it has worked really well. I have tried to put shielding in the cavity, but that didn't work. I guess I could replace all of the electronics, but I got careless for a few seconds last time I was messing with it and dropped the pickguard on to it. Of course the the pickup screw took a little piece out of the body. I don't think I'll be doing any more work on that one

[walrus]

The hiss isn't the amp because I tried 2 different ones. Hissing maybe isn't the best description. It sounds almost like it's picking up a fan signal in the house. The 60Hz hum is pretty much eliminated by the Hum Debugger pedal but it doesn't filter out this other noise. I was hoping that shielding may be a solution. If not, it's not the end of the world.
Sounds like the humbuckers are a completely different sound. I would be curious to hear an A/B comparison.