You can’t stop the signal, Mal.
— Mr. Universe
You see, there’s been a problem with my music setup for some time, but I’ve been too busy lately to properly investigate.
When practicing guitar, sometimes I would hear this noise — an annoying static hiss, as well as a repetitive, ice-picky clicking, like one of those people who pop bubblegum every two or three seconds for hours on end.
Kind of messes with your groove, you know?
Sometimes I would hear the noise on the guitar amp, other times on the bass amp. Usually I wouldn’t hear it on the clean guitar channel at low volumes, where I often practised, so as not to Upset The Cats, so I didn’t notice the correlation right away. And I often rearranged my setup depending on what I was practicing, so it took a long time before I could establish a clear pattern for was going on.
Eventually I noticed that when I switched on the gain channel on the guitar amp, or maybe played the bass amp — sometimes — I would hear the noise.
Along with the popping. That incessant popping.
Disclaimer: I’m a beginning musician. Hypothesis: Maybe musicians just learn to put up with noisy equipment?
Surely that’s not true.
OK, let’s try another tack. That bass amp is really old and I’ve just started using it — do I need a new bass amp?
Hmmm. I love new gear, but let’s think this through.
After more trials, off and on, I then thought the problem might be something to do with the upstairs electrical outlets — maybe they weren’t grounded? Or maybe because I’ve got all this gear packed into a small room, all that metal and those cables were feeding back into the amps?
Or was the power supply on the new pedalboard noisy?
Or was it the Marshall? The Orange?
Was one of the pedals on the pedalboard at fault?
Or was the FBI surveilling me, thinking I’m fetishizing my guitar gear a bit too much?
We don’t understand Rock and Roll, so we need to intercept and interdict. We’ll get a warrant later.
Anyway, I finally had a chance today to debug my guitar noise issue. Lots and lots of debugging, trying to isolate the monster in my guitar.
The root cause turned out to be one of the guitar cables — ironically enough it was a Monster cable.
The cable otherwise looked to be of good quality. I’m not sure where I got it from. All I know is that if I plugged it into an amp or included it anywhere in the signal chain, the hiss of a thousand ghosts plagued my ears.
However, after eliminating the Monster cable, I’ve since enjoyed nothing but musical bliss.
So pronto I’ll be throwing that Monster cable away and ordering a couple new non-Monster guitar cables.
Begone Monster, Be Banished!
Silence never sounded so sweet.