Hi everyone, my newly acquired 1992 Spoiler has one original AXY pickup and one FatBoy that was swapped in, not by the previous owner, but by the owner before him... at which point the bass also got the Ferrite bead and/or the RF upgrade (not sure if those are considered one and the same or if one always comes with the other or not). At that time the rotary selector was also replaced with a blend and the Q switch upgraded to a 3 position specimen. From what I understand this was done at Alembic, but that's just what I was told. Everything looks good inside the cavity as far as I can tell!
When the Q is boosted however, I do notice just a bit of directional hum, that my previous Spoiler from the early 80s did not exhibit (sold that one about a year ago but nothing has really changed in my house or with my amps. I hardly care about a touch of directional hum because I use my Guild Starfire with Bisonic single coils and active filter electronics all the time, so I'm very much used to it and in comparison the Spoiler's hum is hardly noticeable.
My main reason for this post though is that there's an additional hum, only from the FatBoy, only when the Q is boosted, and only when my fingers are right next to or on the face of the pickup. This starts when maybe an inch from the pickup and gets louder the closer I get to it. It's not awfully loud and I don't think anyone would ever notice in a live setting, but I'm just curious if this is a known phenomenon or if this indicates that something could be wrong with the pickup?
Last thing that may be worth mentioning, I came across a similar issue with Joe Barden pickups. They are dead silent when used in a standard passive wiring context (which I believe they were designed for) but once I hooked them up to some JTEX Distiller filters, I started to notice this same kind of finger-to-pickup proximity hum. A very easy solution in this case was just to put copper shielding tape over the face of each pickup, since the exposed rails of the pickup are grounded, it created a nice shield with minimal effect on the tone of the pickups, and the proximity hum was immediately eliminated. Using those pickups with those filters in that exact fashion to this day and it makes for an excellent sounding kinda-Phil-tribute Gibson EB-0 bass!
That said, that vintage EB-0 has tons of mojo and wear, 3 pickups, giant knobs, and so the copper shielding on the pickup tops fits the overall aesthetic of a weird steampunk space machine. With my clean new 1992 Spoiler, I'm not really interested in sticking copper shielding tape to the face of the pickup, so not considering that route there, but figured I'd mention the Gibson/Bardens story since I know in that case it was a shielding issue.
So has anybody else had a similar finger-to-pickup proximity hum with their FatBoy pickups? I tried searching and read a bunch of threads on these pickups but didn't come across any leads. Again, everything else functions exactly as it should, the pickups are strong, no signs of abuse anywhere, and the bass sounds EXCELLENT... I even swapped the pickups around (FatBoy in the neck position and AXY in the bridge position - which I like even better by the way!) to rule out that maybe it could be one side of the preamp or something, but the proximity hum still is happening only with the FatBoy. Put in a new battery, made sure the trim pots weren't totally dimed... all good! It's probably just a new-parent kind of paranoia, overly worried about relatively insignificant details, but please let me know if anyone has any thoughts.
