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So, I know exactly what you’re thinking - and yes on paper it does look that way. But frankly, balanced pro audio gear does such a good job at rejecting noise and isolating in the power section that this is basically never an issue. For years, a standard way to wire studios was “OEO” aka “one end only” meaning, one side of the balanced line had a ground lift, exactly for this reason. Every single piece “theoretically” creates multiple ground loop since they are all connected to power, audio, AND they’re all physically touching in the rack rails! But truth be told, ground loop noise is a spectrum, meaning, there are “worse” ground loops than others. Some are insanely noisy. Some are technically ground loops but don’t have bad noise, as is the case in 99% of rack gear. The amount of noise is based on the small voltage differences, and for balanced pro audio it’s just not that bad. Imperceptible in most cases. So most studios don’t even bother with OEO wiring anymore, and most gear manufacturers are hip to this nowadays and design their gear well to accommodate for standardized wiring.

When you first “get it” it’s easy to look around at all of your gear horrified and be like “oh my god it’s all ground loops!” lol but don’t fret. Fix the noise when it’s a problem. If it’s not a problem, then no need to fix or change anything. And thankfully most gear nowadays is well designed enough to not have these problems. But like, I have to use a ground lifted setup on my vintage LA3A because it has a ground loop problem when interconnecting to other gear. But that piece is like, 60 years old.

It can. That’s one reason why most reamp boxes have transformers and ground lifts. But, the transformer is also there to convert the impedance from low to high, and to convert balanced to unbalanced. And Like I said in one of my other comments, ground loops are kind of everywhere in complicated setups. Often, they are very noisy. Sometimes they are not.

Also remember… if the reamp box is passive, and the pro audio gear has a well designed power supply, then they’re both isolated from the power side of things.

Well, Strymon pedals and power supplies ARE really well designed, are super quiet, and have excellent power isolation. And yeah there potentially could be issues using two different power supplies but, I don’t know, maybe not. That’s hard to say for sure and hard to diagnose. I’m not really sure I can say one way or the other just from this info. I would keep experimenting, try to rule out variables, different combinations. Make sure to test all your cables too. I’m sure you will find the solution. Sorry if that’s not much of a help.

@@RecordingLounge Mate thank you so so much for all your answers! This is really really interesting to me, like its kust fascinating. And truth be told, I really need to turm up level to hear the ground loop, like I mean Inneed to go into a rack unit and go balanced out, crank the gain on the interface and turn up speakers tonhear the geound noise (which then you hear clearly) But alsonthen white noise from the focusrite scarlett 18i20 is allready a lot louder (which is an issue) A little side note also: would you say that most pieces of analog gear could potentially add white noise? Bc yesterday I was recording the level of my signal chain white noise a) with the presonus studio channel rack unit b) without it (firstly recorded a looped signal to make sure the base level is the same for both) Sadly the rms for whote noise only was about 2.5 db louder for the preamped signal compared to the normal instrument level signal with the exact same signal level for the loop itself which makes me sceptical if more hardware units is even a good idea. Simce clean signal is king. Again, amazingly, 8 strymon units didnt add anything in noise, like they are stone quiet. They need to get into rack units more

@marcusstrymon693 yeah, unfortunately white noise / hiss is normal for virtually ANY analog circuitry with amplification stages. It comes from transistors, tubes, even resistors! It’s unavoidable to some degree. I mean “Johnson noise” is literally the noise from electrons moving around inside of the components. Nothing can get rid of that. Over the years the components get better and the circuits get better. When it comes to analog gear you def gotta be careful with gain staging to keep it as quiet as possible. And keep in mind .. Strymon is primarily digital processing. They use the same SHARC chips that UAD cards use. There’s pretty minimal “analog” circuitry in there which is one reason they’re so quiet. And yeah, analog gear is noisy. Digital signal path with a clean pre can sit around -90, -95, 100dBFS. Insanely quiet. But a real Neve 1073 into an 1176? You’re sitting -70, -80 easy. Easily 20-30dB more than a digital piece. Some of it is just the cost of the sound. If you gain stage it right, the noise isn’t really much of an issue. But for some folks, they don’t wanna deal with it, or the sound of the dope analog stuff isn’t worth it for the noise. It’s something you get used to and learn to manage. It becomes part of the toolkit just like anything else - like, if I’ve got a quiet acoustic guitar player, I maybe can’t use that tube mic or compressor, because the noise is possibly gonna be too high. Maybe it’ll be worth it. But I might go for a solid state mic with a slightly cleaner pre and no compressor, and call it a good compromise. And when all else fails… there’s tons of great noise reduction plugins like Izotope RX. And sometimes that’s the compromise. We use the signal chain that sounds amazing but has a little noise, and just deal with it in post.

@@RecordingLounge thanks once again for the long answer, starting to understand things So essentially one could think woth strymon allmost plugin in a box, right? So the presonus that I use has noise floor of 96 db which seems okay, however its still anoying as an always on. It just gets progressively worse when using the comp and adjusting makeup gain (obviously). Still, the value seems okay ish compared to other units (Warm audio bus comp <90, ssl fusion about the same and the harley benton cheaper unit goes in at a whopping 76 db noise floor, which seems unusable). One solution that seems to work is to boost the signal level with the strymon sunset jfet boost with low drive because it does not produce noise almlst at all. That almost reminds me about back in the day when they tried to record as hot as possible on tape as they could to avoid the high noise floor. Hm, difficult, I really like the idea of comp and eq after these strymons but I hate noise. Thing is, kust by tweaking around with that presonus for days with a gr meter whilst playing allready makes me understand compression a lot more intuitively (would beed a 2nd one for stereo comp maybe or some other nice unit like the WA vca bus comp or the art stereo comp for 600 bucks) For eq, I thought about the boss eq 200 as pedal seems like the easiest format but really I think parametriq with q and freq select is a lot more useful but there is nothing useful stereo in pedal format

FWIW, recently I have been preferring the U on electrics! Who knows, 6 months from now I may hate them both. Lol that’s how it goes

@@RecordingLounge I just got my 421 U, really like it, U 421 is best 421 :) Make sure you use your best sailor's knots, and all your plumbers tape and electricians tape experience to lash them securely to the mic stand. So they don't have a chance to faceplant themselves on the floor by jumping off the 'Crappy Clips' (tm). Then they stand a chance of lasting long enough for you to grow to hate them. Even then, a drummer will probably impale them, they're too big a target to miss.

@compucorder64 I use a small cable tie - it will actually slide right in the groove under the clip release button!

I would start by trying to narrow it down first: Try plugging straight into the amp, no pedals. Still get bad hum? If so, you could have a bad ground in your guitar. Try a different guitar. Same noise? A failing filter capacitor or bad connection within the amp can also cause hum. Try a different amp. If your guitar to amp is quiet, then add in your pedalboard. Could be a bad power supply (I’ve not had great luck with Cioks tbh), or a bad cable (extremely common) or a bad connection on a pedal jack (also common). The more you can narrow it down, the easier it will be to find the true cause of the issue. Also… make sure to quadruple check your instrument cables / speaker cables and make sure they are indeed the proper type, and that they’re wired correctly. Like I said, eliminate possibilities one by one. It can be time consuming, but it’ll be worth it when you actually find the root cause.

Also I should say… if you turn your guitar volume down and you don’t have noise, there’s either a wiring issue, or more likely, there’s noise in the room being induced into the pickups. One of the only ways to solve that is distance: don’t sit too close to your amp or anything with a power transformer, any computers, keep your phone out of your pocket. Theres tons of devices around us all the time, and not even humbuckers are fully immune. Induced noise sucks. I wish we could do more about it.

@@RecordingLounge I honestly think it might be my house because I still get hum plugged straight in. I’ve tried different guitars/amps and power supplies etc. would running a Lehle or something similar even with just one amp help at all or would that not work in this case at all?

I hope it was helpful! And hey, good news is that most of the time these things can be fixed without spending any money. Other than the need for isolation transformers Sometimes!

Also a great option!

I think that’s a Mateus Asato riff

Thank you!

No

Yes - so ground loops can form any time two [interconnected] pieces of equipment have different paths to ground, each having slightly different ground voltages or resistances. So if two pieces of gear both plugged in but are interconnected by an AUDIO ground (let’s say one is a pre and one is a compressor) it forms a loop: piece 1 goes to the outlet, and connects to piece 2 with an xlr cable (which has a ground) and piece 2 also goes to the outlet. Hence your loop. Current can flow around this loop from outlet > piece 1 > audio ground > piece 2 > outlet and back again.

If the two pieces of gear aren’t interconnected, you won’t form the loop. like say it’s two guitar amps but one is played by Guitarist 1 and the other is played by guitarist 2. There will be no loop because the two amps are not interconnected with an audio ground. But if guitarist 1 uses a splitter and goes to both amps, you form a loop from splitter > amp 1 > outlet > amp 2 > back to splitter

Already sold it

@indraadhidaksa3052 I'll have one for sale in a week or so as I'm about to do this upgrade. :)

that's exactly what I was thinking. Every mic shown is usable and has really minor differences

I think it depends on the plugin. There are some that get very, very close IMO. But a lot of them just don’t. Personally, most of the Waves ones just don’t do it for me. But a few of the UAD ones get quite close. Really just depends on the brand and even the specific plugin (like the UAD 1081 not having any harmonic distortion that I mentioned later in this video).

For a cool Neve type plugin I def recommend the UAD 1084 or the Kit Plugins BB N105.

Awesome...Thanks Kendal. @@RecordingLounge

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You can almost think about pre-delay as "how far away are the walls from the source sound?" So, just imagine you're standing on a stage in a large venue, but you're just a few feet from a vocalist. The vocalist (the source) is close to you, but the walls are far away, so you'd want a longer predelay. Now, imagine the vocalist walked out into the room - they're now getting CLOSER to the walls, and farther from you. So, you'd want a shorter predelay here because there's less distance between them and the wall. Now yes, in real life, there would also be a time delay from their voice to your ears, but in a recording, we don't always want to simulate THAT delay. Instead, we're really just trying to simulate the timing of the source vs. its ambience. So to rephrase: if you want the source to sound close to you, and the walls to sound far away, use a longer predelay. If you want the source to sound FAR from you, then you need a shorter predelay (because it is "closer" to the walls)

So, for example, often we want our lead vocal to sound "closer" to us than our backing vocals. So on your lead vocal, its reverb should maybe have a longer predelay, but on the backing vocals, their reverb should have a shorter predelay. That will make them sound like they're farther back in the room, closer to the walls, but the lead vocal is closer to you, farther from the walls. This is all just one way to look at it. And it won't apply to EVERY mix situation necessarily; the goal is not always to sound "real." We can create whatever environment we want.

I understood also optimal to have the reverb and delay synced to the tempo. Math isn't that hard to do this. Like, a quarter note delay on a BPM of 120 = 500ms. Subtract a little from this, for the predelay you want, to not soften up the initial attack. Or something like that...

If I recall correctly, yes

No rolloff on either

You won’t regret it. Steinberg FTW

There’s nothing wrong with using a similar pair, or a different pair. Either can work. If you’re into coincident mic techniques like XY or Blumlein or ORTF, a matched pair is usually a better fit. For spaced pair or M/S, you can sometimes get away with different mics. I’d say for MOST things on acoustic, I usually do 1 mic, or M/S. If I’m doing fingerstyle sessions I may do a spaced pair like this. It really all depends on the situation.

Personally, I’d consider the KM184. It would make a nice spaced pair or M/S array with your Mk4. And maybe someday, if you still dig the KM184 over time, you could get a second one.