Noiseless middle pickup humming

[guitarflyer54]

Hi,
I have an Ibanez S470 with 2 D' Activator Necks and a Virtual Vintage 54 Pro in the middle. The middle PU hums in the 2,3,& 4 positions. I checked both coils with a meter and they are OK. Then I pulled the PU to check connections and no problems. I noticed a ground lug screwed to the body inside the middle PU cavity so I taped it and also the bottom of the PU. No change. Could this ground lug be causing some line interference or something? I'm thinking about moving the ground lug but I'm not sure that is the problem and don't know where to relocate it.

[sumgai]

gf,

Unless that "ground lug" is screwed through, thus making electrical contact with, some sort of shielding (paint, foil, etc.), then it's doing no good for you or the guitar. My first suggestion is that you take a meter reading to be sure that it shows Zero Ohms between it and the output jack's ground terminal. If not, then moving it is mandatory.

Where to move it? It's up to you. So long as there is good electrical contact with the aforementioned jack, then there's no one place that's better than any other. Make it easy on yourself.

Without doing any research (I'm getting very lazy in my dotage), I'll guess that your VVP54 is not properly grounded, else it would not hum all by itself. (The issue with humming while it's connected to the other pups in 2 and 4 may be related, or it may be something else. Let's solve one problem at a time.) How about the shield lead (the braided conductor surrounding the other wires as they leave the pickup), is that properly and securely connected to the metal frame of the pup? And the connection on the other end, does the solder job look decent?

Normally when you check the two coils of a humbucker, they'll read within 5% of each other, resistance-wise. If yours have a greater disparity, then this might be a design "feature", where the maker is trading some hum back into the sound, in order to achieve a certain tonality. Again, I'm not Mr. Humbucker around here, so I don't know that this is something you need to consider, or not. Others will probably follow on my heels in a short while..... hopefully with more accurate data.

Stay tuned, sports fan, we'll be right back!

HTH



sumgai