A pedal that actually kills hum in guitar/bass FX chains

Apr 17, 2007 09:35 GMT  ·  By
Build your endless FX pedal chain: the Hum Debugger will make sure things are quiet.
   Build your endless FX pedal chain: the Hum Debugger will make sure things are quiet.

Now, maybe for some people, this is nothing but old news... as a matter of fact, it's not a proper piece of news but rather a tech highlight on a special device every guitar or bass player would simply love.

If you've played guitar or bass for some time now and have gotten used to utilizing various FX pedals (single or multiple, in a chain formation) you should be acquainted to two things. First of all, you should be acquainted to the nasty, horrible and nerve-breaking hum noise many pedals put together create; the second thing you should have knowledge about is the name Electro-Harmonics - old brand producing vintage yet staggering quality effect pedals.

Now, combining these two we get an actual strong opposing sides: FX pedals that make your sound cool and the noise they would invariably make. What if we could effectively kill that hum by adding one more pedal? It's not mystic stuff relating to their number but sheer sound engineering. The Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger.

It's not a noisegate and it's not definitely a Lo-Pass filter or any combination of these two and even further more similar devices; it's far better because when I said "kill" I really meant it. A noisegate or so will be active only as long as the signal is running through it - it filters and the hum comes back once more and so on.

What's killed and dead stays dead (no Pet Cemetery discussions here, please); the Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger breaks the hum off your instrument's signal and eliminates it for good: as long as the pedal's button is depressed, no hum will pass so you don't need any coil-splitting and no fear of hearing the sick hum as you slowly play your little-distortion sound!

This demo movie should explain visually - or better said, acoustically- what's on with this small and very cozy-looking pedal from Electro-Harmonix. It has really impressed me and made me want to check things out more in-depth... because if it really does such a thing, some $120 it sells for are a real bargain, at least for people like me, who hate hum down to the bone!

Ah, I've almost forgotten: this pistachio-green pedal runs in either the Normal or Strong mode, which makes it suitable for crappy guitars/pedals as well (since we all know that crappy gear is actually noise-amplifying).