High pitch noise from guitar effect pedal board?

Submitted by MC208 on Sun, 12/22/2019 - 12:52

I'm getting a high pitch noise (attached) that has something to do with the pedals (also attached)
Noise only happens when going through .
No noise when plugging directly into mixer, or into Clarus, then Mixer.

Guitar --> pedals --> Acoustic Image Clarus --> A&H Mixer --> Peavey Power head

By the sound of the noise itself, can anyone identify what it is and best way to go about addressing it? Thanks!

Comments

Pedal board is: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J3AQRQS/?tag=r06fa-20

You can see the pedals in the photo attachment of my first post, but they are:

  • BOSS CS-3 Compression
  • BOSS DS-1 Distortion
  • BOSS CH-1 Chorus
  • BOSS DD-7 Delay
  • MXR M300 Reverb

Using one of those 1Spot power supplies for all the pedals.

The reason the recording only has the right channel, is I'm only recording the guitar on the right channel.

What is "breakthrough from a switching power supply" ?

I see that the 1-spot page of the TrueTone website has a video on "How to make music with a noisy power supply". Whilst not suggesting that you make that technique part of your performance, you could use it to see whether the problem is connected with the power supply having to power a number of effects pedals.

You could firstly put the signal through each pedal in turn by using them singly rather than chained, but keeping them all powered. You may be able to identify a particular culprit this way. Secondly, you could imitate the video and see whether the characteristic of the noise changes as you plug and unplug the 9V power to each pedal in turn. This assumes that your pedals are well-behaved and pass the signal through cleanly when unpowered.

If neither of these tesrs gives a definitive answer, come back to us and we may have to investigate a bit deeper.

I watched the video on the TrueTone website and that's the noise! But mine is not a knock off, it's the genuine 1Spot.
Anyways, I tried passing the signal through each pedal separately, i.e. guitar into pedal, and out to amp, one at a time, with the 1Spot power plugged into all of the pedals. I did not hear the noise on any single pedal, not even the distortion pedal.
From testing, it seems that the noise kicks in whenever I try to power any 3 of the 5 pedals together. I even tried plugging the 1spot directly into the wall instead of the power strip inside the rack, no difference :-(
I've also sent an email to TrueTone describing the issue so we'll see what they come back with.

MC208, post: 462997, member: 49667 wrote: ...I tried passing the signal through each pedal separately, i.e. guitar into pedal, and out to amp, one at a time, with the 1Spot power plugged into all of the pedals. I did not hear the noise on any single pedal, not even the distortion pedal. From testing, it seems that the noise kicks in whenever I try to power any 3 of the 5 pedals together.

Could you clear up exactly what you did here, as I found this a bit contradictory? You say you had all the pedals powered, but then talk about the noise kicking in when any 3 of the 5 were powered. Perhaps you mean when the signal was routed through any 3 of the 5 powered pedals - would that be right?

Yes, that's correct. I was just making a general statement to describe when the noise kicks in.

When I had the one spot connected to all the pedals, but only routed the guitar signal through one pedal at a time, there was no noise. In that test, I also had all pedals off, except for the one I was testing.

Now that I think about it, I could also do the same test while having all of the pedals on but the guitar signal only going through one at a time. Would that be worthwhile?

Oops, never mind. The pedals can't be on/activated if the ins/outs aren't plugged in. So the test can only be with the 1spot plugged in, but pedals not activated.

I started at the end of the chain:

guitar --> Reverb = OK
guitar --> Delay --> Reverb = OK
guitar --> Chorus --> Delay --> Reverb = high pitched noise

I do also notice that even with two pedals plugged in, if I raise the volume higher, I can still hear the sound, just not nearly as noticeable as with 3 pedals. I wonder if it's always there, and just gets worse the more pedals there are in the chain. That's what I'm starting to believe.