Grounding - To the enclosure or not??

[trad3mark]

Hello all,
I'm working on a modified AMZ Mosfet Booster at the moment. It's on breadboard at the moment, and i like how it sounds. But it's a little noisier that I was anticipating. I know that it's always going to be a little noisier on breadboard, and when i touch the metal baseplate of the breadboard, a lot of the hum (in fact, almost all of it) goes away. I'm guessing this has to do with the way the breadboard is so awful at grounding.

Anyway, this made me wonder about grounding pedals in general. I recently cracked open a few of my pedals just to see how they do grounding. Some of them seem to have the common ground also touching the enclosure (most noticible in my EHX Big Muff, the tone and wicker one), but others, some of which have much higher gain, don't (ohnoho's blowing up for example).

So, how important/unimportant is it to ground pedals to the enclosure?

[mremic01]

If your jacks aren't insulated, then you should already be grounding the enclosure through them. Otherwise, if it cuts noise for you and doesn't cause any other issues, go for it.

[petemoore]

 test 1; with short signal-routing wires
test 2: with above + box/groundshield
test 3: with above/below ground shield
test 4: with average length signal wires.
   Start with 1 since requirement involves simply laying out the box accordingly, simple for 1 knob effect.
   Add 2 any time.
   3...you probably already orient earth to cover a wide angle of 1/2 of 360 of the degrees of pitch/yaw...ie you set the floorpedal on the floor, so another grounded substrate above ["Ground Plane"]...makes a good/fairly easy way to secure the pot/switch, even jacks if you like that kind of layout etc..aluminum or steel top or top plate.
  4 is likely to be the same as 1,2 or 3 in performance, depending on the conditions at the test site of course.

 

[trad3mark]

I took an old enclosure, and put it in, with a common ground to the box. It definitely helps, so i'm gonna go for it. No harm i guess.

Cheers guys.