Weird noise problem in pedal chain

[brett]

Hi.  I wonder if anybody has experienced this very strange problem.  

I get a "scratching" noise when I touch my pedals or the power supply cable.  The noise is directly related to the amount of physical disturbance (if I pick up a pedal and drop it from 1", there's a loud noise, but if I just touch a pedal, I get a soft noise).  Also, it's not related to the AC power supply.  The same thing happens when powered off a battery.  Current draw appears normal.  I use one of those "daisy-chain" cables to power  four pedals from one supply.  The noise is definately not mains hum.

This is driving me nuts!   :roll:

Other info: It happens for all of my different chains, even if only 1 pedal is switched on.  It seems to happen with all combinations, as long as 1 pedal is used.  It stops when all pedals are bypassed.

Wot's going on?  Any suggestions?   Help :!:

PS Examples of typical chains are (i) rock'n'roll - Dyna/Ross compressor, MXR45 phaser, Voodoo drive or TS9 or TS7, Rebote echo and (ii) blues - Orange squeezer, homemade wah or octavia, tube-sound fuzz or EZFUZZ or FuzzFace, Rebote echo .

[Paul Marossy]

My first thoght is that maybe one of the power supplies in one of the pedals has a slight short or something. What I would probably do is take one pedal out of the chain at a time and see if it still does the weirdness. It's most likely one pedal that's causing the problem.
Is your pedal board plastic? There may some kind of static build up thing going on, kind of like the plastic pickguard on a Strat.

[toneless]

Perhaps isolating the jacks from your diy pedals will help a little.
Try with battery's,too.See what happens.

Nick

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

I made some 'DIY' cable from some blue covered stuff I found in a dumpster once, turned out it was 'microphonic', you could triger a drum machine input by jumping on it!!
So if you are using 'weird' cabling, that could be it.
But it is much likelier to be a tarnished jack socket somewhere, I think.

[brett]

thanks for the suggestions.  I'll double-check that there's not a dodgy connection inside one of the pedals (the Rebote is the main suspect because I use it in nearly every setup).  The only other "common" factor that I can think of is the power supply cable.  Paul's suggestion makes me think that the cable might have an intermittent fault in it that makes it "microphonic".  If so, it's amazingly sensitive to movement.  Also, I wonder if it could be radiating an EM field into the amp, which detects an AC signal when the cable is moved (ie vibrated)?  Or am I getting paranoid?  I'll buy another cable and see if it does the trick.

thanks everyone.

PS All my jacks are the plastic insulated types and it happens with batteries too.