It's not where I live that's the problem. It's not an issue in my house, and if all I did was sit at home and tinker, then I could quite happily live with the barely audible background hum of single coil pickups. I've played Strats for years too. I toured NZ in 1997 as part of a performing arts team with a fairly decent sized old school par can based lighting rig, and it wasn't really a major issue there for the most part either. I got pretty good at turning the volume knob down on my guitar when I wasn't playing.*UNIQUE* wrote:All this talk of hum in single coils...really, is it this bad? I played Strats for decades before I become ill with them and never suffered from all this hum that I see regular posts on (and we had big lighting racks back then - pre LED days). Sooty, are you sure you haven't sort of become overly obsessive about this? Maybe the whole suburb where you live has dirty power or something? I know where we record the power is hideous...everything hums there (amps, humbuckers, bass guitar, monitor systems, me humming when taking a pee). Not ideal. Maybe you have the same problem?
The solution might be to move.
6 or 7 years ago I joined the music team of a church that was quite small at the time, but has grown into the biggest church in Wellington, and one of the biggest in the country. As we have grown the noise issues for the guitar rigs seem to have "past participle of get" worse. We have a dedicated lighting team and while I don't know much about lighting, our rig consists of all sorts of LEDs, movers, dimmers (I guess), blinders, and I don't know what else.
Last year we had a big conference in the Michael Fowler centre, which is our regular city church venue. There were extra lights, and some kinda special light beam thing directly behind us, which you can see in the pic below. The noise was so bad enough even with my Reverend's humbuckers that I needed to borrow a noise gate from work (which I eventually bought), and my Strat became completely unusable. The hum was literally as loud as the guitar signal.
Now I don't know if the problem's just the lighting or what. It wasn't just that one weekend, that was just the most extreme example. Most of the guys at church use humbuckers or noiseless single coils. Everyone was having noise issues that weekend. The set up guys are careful to make sure the sound equipment is powered seperately from the lighting equipment. One of our newer guys seems to get away with single coils (he bought my Bareknuckles), but he wasn't playing at that conference.
It becomes quite a big problem whenever I play in the city. I used to think maybe the MFC had bad power or something, but now I think it's probably just the lights. I've tried everything with my rig to keep the noise down as much as possible, expect better patch cables. But if it was my rig that was the problem, then installing noiseless pickups wouldn't have solved anything, and it did, it got rid of the problem completely. I've done extra sheilding in my already fairly well sheilded Strat, but that didn't seem to make much difference.
Nowadays I usually play at the smaller Kapiti venue, where it's not quite as much of a problem, but still, the nature of worship music is that there is a lot of 'quiet parts', where the insensity of the music drops away in favour of the intensity of the mood. I hope that makes sence. In these quiet moments I often play some 'tasteful', moody lead stuff, and that's when the hum becomes a little problematic. I find myself always switching to the neck/middle position of the Strat to cut the hum, when I much prefer the neck only tone.
So yep, I've "past participle of get" fairly obsessive about it, because I like single coils. I'd like to get a Jazzmaster one day, but with a lack of noiseless Jazzmaster pickup options on the market, I'm not sure how I could use it at church, which is where I play most. I've been thinking of selling my Strat for a JM for ages, but this is the main thing holding me back (as well as a fear of the unknown!)
The Noise Gate is enough to deal with it at the Kapiti venue, but fairly useless on the Strat in the city.
Huh? 
