Well, that was a long strange trip.
I've noticed that my Alembic bass picks up noise from nearby cell phones. Okay, pretty much anything will pick up a cell phone if it's close enough, the Alembic is just a little more sensitive than my passive basses. (So just turn off your **** phone at rehearsals and gigs or leave it in the car like I do, m'kay?) I've learned to leave mine in the other room when I'm practicing.
But recently I've been noticing little bursts of buzzy noise more and more. Tonight I was practicing, couldn't stand it anymore, I'd had enough, turned off all the cell phones, all the wifi. Didn't make a difference.
I won't bore you with details of the hour or more I spent plugging this into that, swapping gear around. The tube preamp might be just a little hissy (gotta look into that later), but that wasn't the big issue. The problem was definitely associated with the bass, not any cables or amplification gear - swapped all of that out, one thing at a time.
So is the preamp in my bass going bad and generating this noise? Well, anything's possible, but what's likely? An external noise source seems more probable than an Alembic preamp with an almost-new battery making intermittent noise.
I was ready to start throwing circuit breakers to try to figure out what (if anything) in the house was the source of the interference the bass was picking up. I live in a rural area, so it seemed likely to be something in my house, not from my neighbors (unless someone was running a spark gap transmitter or something).
I started by checking outlet strips, I have a few in the room - maybe a failing protection device in one? I was about to switch off the one the stereo and my little mixer is plugged into... when I realized that the light on the switch was flickering exactly in sync with the noise bursts. Aha!
I unplugged everything from it - still getting the noise. Unplugged it from the wall and the noise stopped.
Just to make sure I'd really found the problem, I started plugging everything back in again. Got it all hooked up and everything was working - no noise, and the light on the switch wasn't flickering anymore. My best guess is that the plug had poor contact in the socket and unplugging it and plugging back in cleaned the contacts.
Weird. Not the way I planned to spend my woodshed time tonight.
