Spent 14 hours tracing a ground loop in my guitar rig before I found the real issue

I was getting this horrible hum through my amp every time I turned on my pedalboard, and I figured it had to be a ground loop issue. I spent a whole Saturday pulling pedals off the board one by one, checking cables, even swapped out my power supply for a different one I borrowed from a buddy. After like 8 hours I was ready to give up, but then I noticed the hum got quieter when I touched the input jack on my tuner pedal. Turned out the nut on the jack was just a little loose, like barely a quarter turn, and it was messing up the ground connection inside the pedal. Fixed it in 30 seconds with a socket wrench and the whole rig was dead silent. Has anyone else had a dumb fix like that take way longer than it should have?

2 comments

2 Comments

lunaw722h ago

Not sure I'd call a loose jack nut a "dumb fix" exactly. Stuff like that is the bread and butter of guitar troubleshooting. I mean, you spent 14 hours because you assumed the problem was way more complicated than it actually was. That happens to all of us. I've literally had a similar thing with a cable that looked fine but the solder joint inside the plug was cold. Took me a whole day of swapping everything else out before I wiggled the cable just right and heard the crackle. Sometimes the simple stuff hides in plain sight.

kelly.parker14m ago

I mean 14 hours though? That's a lot of time to not just check the basics first. If you're going to call yourself a tech, you should have a process where you look at jacks and cables before diving into the deep stuff. That's not a "hidden in plain sight" thing, that's skipping step one.