Shield your guitars!

[cd]

I finally got around to shielding my guitar, following the instructions on www.guitarnuts.com.  I've been putting it off out of sheer laziness, plus I've been real happy with my tone lately and didn't want to mess it up by changing strings .   Did it make any difference?  Well, today I was doing some recording with a BF Champ, which has the tone controls disabled and no reverb, but I could definitely hear a bit of reverb "dwell" and "ping", especially on open chords.  Turned out by shielding my guitar properly (thereby lowering the hum and noise) I brought out the sound of trem springs in my Strat (which were previously buried under noise).

Shielding is not a simple thing to do, but it's not that hard either.  I would say it's as complicated as building a first effect.  Luckily I had the spray glue lying around (for mounting photos) otherwise I might never have gotten around to it  But if your guitar is not already well shielded, I would give it a try before trying any other "tone enhancing" mods or FX.

[runmikeyrun]

Just shielding your cavity ain't that big o deal.  Get a can of 3M spray adhesive, the good stuff.  I've found it's easier to form the AL or CU foil to the contours and then spray the foil, not the guitar's cavity... less mess.  Don't forget to make sure there is good contact from the foil to either the jack's baseplate or pots (if grounded) so all that RF has somewhere to go.

As a bass player and singer i figured it was very important to lift my string ground to reduce my risk of electrocution, even though being electrocuted to death on stage would be great for our album sales.  I had to shield the cavity really well, as well as shield the pickups... soapbars... made it easy.  Wrapped em in AL foil, spray painted em black (the whole guitar is black) and then wrapped em in clear contact paper so the paint and foil wouldn't chip off... unless you inspect them from an inch away you'd never notice.  

If you sing and play you might want to lift your string ground to be on the safe side, although i've heard there's a way to isolate you with a capacitor too.

[Tim Escobedo]

I'm still pretty fuzzy about the role of string ground on guitar. It seems obvious that it works. However, I'm not too sure why it works.

A few months back, I completely shielded a LPJr-ish guitar, P90s and all. I found I could remove the string ground without penalty, at least in my own rather limited testing room. That was the most obvious improvement made by the shielding job.

[bwanasonic]

The aforementioned guitarnuts link has info on electrocution protection. Also,  I prefer rubber cement (and heavy duty aluminum foil) to spray adhesive.

Kerry M