Electrically shielding electric guitars is a popular way to try to reduce the hum & noise picked up by a guitar. Radiated electrical noise can affect a guitars signal & then be heard through your amp or studio equipment. For more information about electrical noise, try readin our page. We use shielding & a combination of other noise reduction techniques on many electric guitars & electric basses.
What is an Electrical Shield?
A shield is usually a conductive metal foil or conductive paint that surrounds the guitars electronics. You can think of the electrical shield as a barrier that absorbs the offending radiated energy before it reaches your guitar wiring. For solid-body guitars with a control cavity routed in the body, this is easy to add - For hollow body guitars, shielding can become more complex. Far from being a mystery science or magic, shielding & noise reduction on an instrument is really no different to techniques used in many electronics instrumentation or signal processing products. Having said that, it is so often got wrong! Even new guitars which often include a painted shield are all too often near to ineffective. Sometimes a poorly installed shield can actually make the problems worse!
About Installing the Guitar Shielding
Installing a shield depends upon the guitar type, the pickups used & how the cavities are arranged. Before doing anything we test the guitar to see just how affected it is to radiated electrical energy. We record the measurement so that we can compare the completed result after all of the guitar shielding modification has taken place. The electronics is carefully removed from the guitar and all the cavities are lined with a copper foil. We use copper foil because it is the most effective conductor and easily allows soldering of joints to form a 100% shield with no gaps. Several modifications are made to the guitar wiring as the electronics are re-installed into the control cavities. We then check the installation and retest the guitars susceptibility to ensure success.
Will a shield solve all of my guitar noise problems?
A guitar wiring shield can be very effective when properly installed, but is only part of the guitar noise puzzle. There a few other reasons why your guitar or amp setup might be suffering from noise, ranging from your pickups, guitar cable, amp & ground loops. If you want to learn some more about noise & hum, please visit our What's That Noise? page.
Fender Stratocaster, Telecaster are registered trademarks of the Fender Musical Instrument Company (FMIC). Catalina Guitars is not affiliated with FMIC.
Back to top 