getting around "cleaned up" fuzz face hiss when recording. any advice?

[ode2no1]

lately i've been using a fuzz face with a pregain control as an overdrive, but as we all know, backing off your guitar volume (or using a pregain control) really lets the white noise shine. how do you deal with this in a recording situation? i want to use this set up for a batch of new songs my band is going to record but i don't know that i can with the amount of hiss coming out of my amp. i'm running the cleaned up fuzz into a mild overdrive to smooth it out a bit, which is obviously bringing up the noise level even more. for shows and rehearsals i can deal with it, but i don't know how to go about recording it.

[joegagan]

that pregain pot is going to be part of the problem.
a plastic element pot will help, but even better yet, find the R to ground that you like and get rid of the pot and stick one R to ground there.

one idea i thought would be fun is a twelve step switch with settings like an attenuator.

[ode2no1]

the pregain acts as your guitar volume would though right? cause i find the same hiss problem when playing any fuzz face and cleaning it up at the guitar. so you're saying that a fixed value resistor won't be as noisy? the main problem is letting the last chord of a song ring out while recording and having it naturally sustain and fade out but having the giant amount of hiss become more noticeable as the notes die out. also, kind of feel honored that you replied joe. i remember wanting a bronto boost SO badly when i was a teenager but having no means to buy one. i was definitely a nvn fanboy.

[joegagan]

The signal going through two pots will induce more hiss, the portion of the pregain pot not going to ground acts as a series resistor. The type of material the pot is made of will affect this. A simple R to ground instead is not adding series resistance and can reduce hiss relative to the two pot method.

[joegagan]

Btw, thanks for the nvn mention. People have been requesting brontoboosts, will be making them again soon.

[EATyourGuitar]

use a metal film resistor. they are a little better than carbon comp. tayda has them super cheap. try anything 100k to 10k

[wavley]

Hiss is kind of a problem when recording and you should clean it up as much as you can, but there is only so much hiss you can get rid of in a fuzz face.  I can't add anything that Joe hasn't already, not that doesn't kill too many highs anyway so certainly take his advice on this.

[soap box] I know in this day and age of digital noise reduction programs, DAW editing, noiseless emulations of noisy things, and uber clean recordings... (insert basically the same speech you give to young girls about TV/Magazines and body image), but the stray hiss, hum, and snare rattle is kind of the sound of rock and roll and real musicians using real amps and real pedals.  We should do what we can to mitigate it within reason but I think that there is a point where we just have to say "Close enough for Rock and Roll"[/soap box]

One tip for helping deal with it in a DAW is to automate a low pass filter to sweep down as the chord dies out, it usually does a good job of letting things die down and transitioning into the next part.  When done right it can be a great compromise between vintage gear/noise and clean recording. 

[EATyourGuitar]

oh if you really want to use computers, don't use sweeping low pass filters. thats so 5 minutes ago. new software comes out all the time. industry is moving fast these days. you can train the computer recognize the fingerprint of your noise and totally eliminate it!

[Jazznoise]

High shelf off after 5Khz, it's where alot of audible noise will be and where your guitar tone wont be.

It's that attenuation that's killing you. Is it really making THAT much of a difference? You're essentialy trying to mute the high end of the guitar with the FF by using it's low input Z. Why not try building a buffer stage and doing the same thing without the noisey feedback clipper stage? Or why not run your Fuzz Face a little hotter into the overdrive and see if you notice a change in tone (try and balance the loudness).

You can do the same level of denoising with ReaFIR or or Adobe Audition. Artifacts become obvious with intense noise reduction.

[LucifersTrip]

is the hiss prob just as bad with a battery?


http:// f s b .org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=21970

[wavley]

High shelf off after 5Khz, it's where alot of audible noise will be and where your guitar tone wont be.

You can do the same level of denoising with ReaFIR or or Adobe Audition. Artifacts become obvious with intense noise reduction.

I agree with this, I bandpass all guitars to varying degrees, but sometimes I think the tails of noisy things sometimes need a little more help.

Honestly, I don't have a kick against noise removal software, but I don't want to pay the money for the ones that work transparently (Like RX, I do use Ozone though) and I would prefer to do the hard work on the front end to minimize the noise in the first place.  The noise that's left I just deal/live with, we just don't live in a world where all the great sounding circuits and amps are perfectly quiet (like when I compared the Space Echo pedal to my real ones, there's something missing because the noise is gone) so it doesn't really bother me.  I also don't dig autotune but if that's the thing that folks like... well, it's their art not mine.  I just like to remind people that it's ok to be human and imperfect when making music, when I turn on top 40 radio it doesn't seem that way and not in a fun robot Kraftwerk way.

Maybe I'm just an old fuddy duddy.

It's that attenuation that's killing you. Is it really making THAT much of a difference? You're essentialy trying to mute the high end of the guitar with the FF by using it's low input Z. Why not try building a buffer stage and doing the same thing without the noisey feedback clipper stage? Or why not run your Fuzz Face a little hotter into the overdrive and see if you notice a change in tone (try and balance the loudness).

Of course I don't know how much he's attenuating, but when I use the pre-gain on mine it's still not clean, I just like the warm fuzziness that turning down the fuzz knob just doesn't give me.  I've often thought of just wiring the fuzz wide open and ditching the pot and just using the pre-gain to control the fuzz.  Personally, I just don't have any use for the fuzz knob.  I haven't really spoken in depth with anybody else about how they use theirs.

[EATyourGuitar]

Artifacts become obvious with intense noise reduction.

I don't want to pay the money for the ones that work transparently (Like RX, I do use Ozone though)

wavley knows what RX can do. don't knock it till you have tried it. in that video it shows how you have controls you can use to eliminate the artifacts too. this is well above adobe software. when this was first shown to the world at AES the line was out the door to talk to a izotope product rep.

[pinkjimiphoton]

in my experience with fuzzes, if they are super hissy, it's often the transistors.
you may wanna socket them puppies and play with them, play with the bias, too.
my ff isn't any noisier on really than off. i could (and have) used it when recording with no major hassles.
could be the way i bias it tho.

[wavley]

in my experience with fuzzes, if they are super hissy, it's often the transistors.
you may wanna socket them puppies and play with them, play with the bias, too.
my ff isn't any noisier on really than off. i could (and have) used it when recording with no major hassles.
could be the way i bias it tho.

This is also true, I don't find my fuzz face to be super hissy, it is noisier than my straight amp but not as noisy as my big muff.  Maybe you have a noisy device or noisy power like LucifersTrip said.

[ode2no1]

thanks for all the replies guys. i recorded a demo of a song i plan on using this cleaned up fuzzface overdrive sound with today and i noticed that with everything in the mix it isn't TOO big of a deal. it's just when i was recording the guitar and it was way louder in my headphones than i would actually be in the mix of the song i thought i would have a ton of trouble with it. i think i still might on the tail end of songs, but i'll try out all the suggestions. and maybe i'm crazy, but i have built like ten fuzz faces and there is always more white noise with my guitar backed off than with any of my other pedals. ive done germanium, silicon, hybrids...the noise is always there. then again with my band i use 3 overdrives in series...the first one is like my "clean," running into another which gives me "overdrive," then the last one is my full distorted tone....so obviously when i want a cleaner sound i just turn one or two of them off and the noise level isn't too bad. using a device at max gain but cleaning it up at the front end is leaving me with more noise than i'm used to.

and joe...i look forward to the bronto boost coming back. any idea when this might be happening?

[joegagan]

thnks daniel. sometime this year. the first 10- batch is spoken for.