Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

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?

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

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.

jps wrote: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...

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

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.