Help! My amp is buzzing!!!

Have you tried turning it off and then on again;

if that doesn't fix it, you'll have to reload the entire operating system.

It's plugged in, right?


Sorry, I'm not a standup guy, at least not in your basement.


Have you lightly tapped on the tubes? Get someone to play the guitar and then tap gently on the tubes with something like a doctor's rubber mallet... if any tube reacts weirdly to the tapping, try replacing that tube with a known good one. IDK what the hell I'm talking about here, I just came to see if I could learn something.





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I sometimes get a metallic rattling sound from my amp. Then I move my pedal board which is sitting on the same box as the amp a bit and it goes away. Sometimes something as simple as a pedalboard making slight contact with the amp is enough to make a really annoying sound.

I think there's a kind of stethoscope thing that you can buy at car parts places. The idea is that you can focus in on what is casing a particular sound when there is lots of other noise distracting you. Another thing to try is pressing various parts of the amp while playing to see if things are loose. For example play something which triggers the sound and try pressing the grill cloth in different places. Sometimes the buzz will go away when you press one place and it tells you what is rattling.

Is the amp sitting on something? Is there anything else on there that might rattle? Are the tube shields rattling? Any cables or other things in the back of the cab? You'll figure it out!
 
Need a sound sample!

Otherwise it's just shots in the dark....Things I've found:

An Ernie Ball shaker egg rolled out the handle of my 4x12 when I put it face down on the floor to pop the back off so I could see which speaker was blown. It was the shaker egg.

The glass escutcheon on the ceiling light was vibrating against the bulb. A tweak of the socket fixed that.

A recap job on the Deluxe Reverb I bought WAY before I started working with amps had two capacitors vibrating against each other. Silicone fixed that, on the same amp the metal piping around the grill cloth was buzzing because a staple came loose. Fixed with silicone that before I found the capacitors. Interestingly enough this happened 20 years after I bought the amp.
 
RetiredUnit1 said:
Need a sound sample!

Otherwise it's just shots in the dark....Things I've found:

An Ernie Ball shaker egg rolled out the handle of my 4x12 when I put it face down on the floor to pop the back off so I could see which speaker was blown. It was the shaker egg.

The glass escutcheon on the ceiling light was vibrating against the bulb. A tweak of the socket fixed that.

A recap job on the Deluxe Reverb I bought WAY before I started working with amps had two capacitors vibrating against each other. Silicone fixed that, on the same amp the metal piping around the grill cloth was buzzing because a staple came loose. Fixed with silicone that before I found the capacitors. Interestingly enough this happened 20 years after I bought the amp.
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Yeah I’ll try to take an audio clip to demonstrate the problem!
 
giovanni said:
Uhm I recorded a couple things on my phone last night but I can barely hear the rattling. Maybe I was over focusing on it?
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I may have missed your response, but have you tried swapping the coin base power tubes for full base? If the metal claws from the socket are touching the glass on the tubes, that could cause quite a bit of chatter.
 
coltonius said:
I may have missed your response, but have you tried swapping the coin base power tubes for full base? If the metal claws from the socket are touching the glass on the tubes, that could cause quite a bit of chatter.
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I haven’t. I don’t really feel comfortable doing that kind of work on a tube amp… I’m just trying to diagnose and then I’ll take it to a tech.
 
How frequency dependent is it? When I've had to track down vibrations, it's been much easier if I could feed them a nice steady stream of whatever it is that they're resonating with. I had a "near" G-sharp in my music room, that I really couldn't place (which direction, even!) when I was playing, so I isolated the note, and played it from a few, generator app on my iPad. The offender was a screw in the curtain rod.
 
giovanni said:
I haven’t. I don’t really feel comfortable doing that kind of work on a tube amp… I’m just trying to diagnose and then I’ll take it to a tech.
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It’s just switching tubes- pull the old ones out, put the new ones in. Literally, the easiest and first thing you should check. Paying a tech to swap them for you is like throwing money in the trash.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but if you can’t/won’t do that, you should stop wasting time in this thread and drop it off since nothing will be solved and your tech is going to do all this troubleshooting anyway. :)
 
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