Hum Reducer?

I have quite a few pedals now, and with all of them hooked up I get quite a bit of hum. I am using homa 1 fott cables to connect them, but I am wondering if its worht the 100 of so dollars for a hum reducer. Will it really reduce all the hum yet keep the sound, or will it drain my tone?

My friend just bought a DC Brick. He uses it for 4 pedals, and apparently it does a great job of reducing noise. No loss of tone or anything. I am most likely going to buy one for myself in the near future. You should definitely look into one.

Yeah, it's tough. I have that hassle in the studio all the time. So I use a combination of DeNoisers, a whole bunch of manual editing, gates and EQing.

Alternatively, if I can't get rid of the amp noise I'll go direct and use something like Amplitube to simulate the original sound.
In a lot of cases, the simulated sound is better than the original.

A few things you should check out first... Is the hum present when none of the pedals are hooked up, i.e. just guitar straight into amp? If so, it could just be the power outlet that you're plugged into. Try plugging into a different outlet, and/or make sure you and your amp aren't close to a TV, stereo, computer, etc... as these can cause some nasty humming. If none of that is the case, start by connecting one pedal at a time until the hum appears. If the hum appears after connecting a certain pedal, disconnect it and connect the rest of the pedals. if the hum is still there, you might just need better cables. Hosa is a really cheap brand of cables, and the quality of the cable really does make a difference.

I found that using only batteries in my boss pedals instead of an adapter i got less that half the noise.

PRS has covered it, but I can vouch for the cables. I had some random cheap ass no-name patch cables... and I had a bit of noise which I needed to gate. I switched them all for Van Damme cables a while back, and now I can only get any noise at all by using my CS3 compressor, which I guess must just be a bit crappy....

expensive, but worth it (for me anyway!)...

Originally Posted by: force_of_shredI found that using only batteries in my boss pedals instead of an adapter i got less that half the noise.

That could be from a bad power source (old electrical wiring in your house, poorly done wiring, bad grounding, etc...), and that's why using batteries quieted things down.

Originally Posted by: renPRS has covered it, but I can vouch for the cables. I had some random cheap ass no-name patch cables... and I had a bit of noise which I needed to gate. I switched them all for Van Damme cables a while back, and now I can only get any noise at all by using my CS3 compressor, which I guess must just be a bit crappy....

expensive, but worth it (for me anyway!)...

yeah, i can vouch for cables too. I used to install high end stereo systems and switched to Monster Cable years ago when I heard what they can do. Definitely expensive ($250 for a pair of 3ft directional RCA cables to connect my CD Player to the stereo system) but worth every penny as long as there's no weak point anywhere else in the system.

I've got the same hum problem myself whenever I use Boss Multi-effects units. Especially near the computer monitor.
The only way around it is to bypass the pedal altogether, record direct line-in and then apply effects later using VST plug-ins.