DIY Noise Suppressors

[Scruffie]

I stand by shielding the guitar as atleast a good start, it wont cure the Fizz of your Boss, that's just the Boss (A gate rather than supressor might work better) but i'd say fighting the source of the noise, the pickups, which are going to pick up all the noise and then have pedals and an amplifier amplify it is your best bet to cut down on noise, Positions 1, 3 & 5 of my single coiled strat are dead quiet, quieter than my Humbuckers perhaps (I also have a metal scratchplate which probably helps) i've recored very happily with that guitar without noise hassle.

[Gordo]

I stand by shielding the guitar as atleast a good start,

I was always amazed to find out that the echoey flanged sound behind the solo in Heart's "Barracuda" was guitarist Roger Fisher holding the guitar cable he'd unplugged from his strat and waving it around behind his amp head while running a Ross Flanger.  I guess as far as noise goes sometimes bad=good...

That said, yeah, I agree.  If you can stop it at the source you have a good chunk of the problem solved.

[Ben N]

Absolutely true--about eliminating noise at the source. A set of Bill Lawrence pups isn't much more than an NS-2, and the tonal compromise involved (and there is one, to be sure) is, to my ears, prefereable to what noise gates and suppressors do. In DIY pedal-land, that means using MF resistors, trying out different semiconductors for lowest noise, being extra careful about layout and shielding, finding the best power solution, lowering input impedance where higher is not required, etc.
Having said all that, there may still be a place for noise suppression in some rigs, under some conditions, and as Mark pointed out above, the more subtly it can be applied and the more targeted it is to actual sources of noise the better. But the approaches are complimentary, not exclusive, and lowering noise at the source will permit suppression technologies to work more effectively and less obviously.

[Steve Mavronis]

Maybe I just need a pedalboard power supply filter too. Right now I don't even have a pedalboard and just place my "two" pedals on top of my practice amp!

[petemoore]

  I'd say maybe as a good approach in general:
  Figure out what you need it on.
  Say it's a hard compressing distorter, gate controlling the output by what the input is doing may allow better control to allow small voltage [low volume long note sustain] input to keep the gate open, cutting output only when input is very low [yet still enough higher than whatever noise the detector could be confused by..ie lower noise = easier to tell very low signals from noise].
  Otherwise, with the detector and the gate placed somewhere/anywhere in the chain, often a long one with various boosts of noise and signal, not necessarily in proportions that the detector will recognize in a way that coincides with what a noise supressor was thought to be able to do.