Hi,
About a month ago, I bought a Mooer GL100. It’s a looper with quite good quality drum beats. I know some others on this forum have one. I mostly use the drums to get my timing right as I don’t like the metronome. I’m going to start looping later when my timing is better.
Mine adds quite a lot of hum/hiss to the signal. I play single coil guitars (tele, Strat) so I’m used to a bit of background hum but this is more intrusive to me. I’m wondering whether others have noticed that it adds background noise or whether it’s just mine. It doesn’t seem right.
It worked ok (but with hum) for about a month although I haven’t used it intensively. I just came back from holiday, plugged it in with my Strat last night to use the drum beats for timing practice and after a while my Strat started to get quieter and quieter. At first I thought it was me accidentally knocking the volume knob of the guitar (I do that with the Strat) but it was the pedal. The volume of the guitar was going up and down but mostly down until no sound. The drum beats continued as normal and at constant volume so it wasn’t a bad connection. Disconnected the pedal and then my Strat was fine. Played 30 mins without the pedal no problems. Then tried the pedal again and after 10 minutes the same thing happened again.
The volume thing means it’s likely to be faulty unless I’m doing something wrong. ??
For those of you who have this pedal, does yours add humming / hissing to the signal?
I bought it in Thomman and it’s past the 30 day return but if it’s faulty it is under warranty so I could contact Thomman.
Thanks for any replies,
Ian
I can’t say I’ve noticed any problems with mine. On one hand I don’t play through my amp often and when I do I dont always do any looping, so my experience is limited but on the other, when I do play through my amp the looper is on and part of the signal chain even if I’m not looping.
I can’t remember if I’ve tried my Tele with it. When I do my practice later today I’ll give it a try and report back
Assuming you used it in those 30 days I think you’d have noticed the hum if it was present and it’s at least worth trying telling Thomann that it’s faulty and see if they help or not.
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It sounds like component(s) are failing in the guitar circuit, it ma be still putting out the drum track as this is stored and and replayed through another circuit,
I did a quick search and there are a few similar issues. I would return it as not fit for purpose, due to failure in short time.
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Thanks @mattswain and @AJSki2fly
Yes, for the recent problem of the guitar going quiet, it sounds like a failing circuit.
The other problem of hissing/humming is constant, and was like that the first time I plugged it in, whether I’m using the pedal or not, as long as it’s switched on and connected to the amp and the guitar. It sounds as if it’s not properly shielded.
I think I’ll contact Thomman.
Just connected up mine with my Tele for a couple of minutes, no unwanted noise (other than my terrible looping efforts) even with the volume on the guitar maxed. Does seem like yours is faulty
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Thanks Matt for checking. Much appreciated!
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This sounds like the right thing here.
Hum is a normal impairment we need to deal with. Hiss is different and we normally can get this noise low enough to not be a major distraction. Since you are getting both, I would wonder if the amp pre-loop gain is very low and post-loop gain is very high. I am talking gain in the sense of making signals larger, not the slang guitarist meaning of distortion. Given that your signal seems to be reducing over time, the post loop gain being high because you have been adjusting to compensate seems plausible causing both hum and hiss to be louder than you expect. Keep your guitar volume set fairly high as well - like 8 or more. This will help keep your signal to noise ratio good going into the final gain stages of the amp.
You should also make sure you don’t have a bad cable in the loop. It should be as short as reasonable to pick up the least amount of noise. I use shielded instrument cables to keep hum down, and don’t use my longer 20-foot (6 meter) cable unless I really need to. My cables are 10-feet for guitar and as short as possible elsewhere.
Now for the pedal directly. The controls appear to be digitally encoded. Very common in electronics these days. I’ve seen these encoders jitter or climb/fall with no change to the knob. In my case I feel it is due to debris that got into my unit over time (this is a speaker system for a computer). My unit is probably 20 years old now and the volume can jump around a lot, especially when touched. If yours is mis-behaving so soon after purchase, then you should be looking at a replacement. This may help with your hum and hiss as well.
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Thanks for these suggestions. I don’t think I have bad cables (I have decent cables and the first thing I did was swap them around the check each cable) and I also try to keep them as short as possible. Also as mentioned, the drum machine part of the unit works faultlessly and it’s just the guitar signal that slowly disappears. So it’s not a bad cable at least not between the looper and the amp.
This hiss doesn’t change much in volume except when the guitar signal disappears then the hissing gets louder. I’m just going to ask Thomman if they can repair/replace it. I think they are likely to just send me another one to try (hopefully).
Repair is unlikely. It may go back to Moor but that is more likely from Thomann, not you - at least I’d hope for that.
If the looper input is falling slowly, it really points to the encoder. There are things that can make a large impact to hissy sounding noise and reducing signal early in the chain is one of the biggest, especially if there is some adjustment later to compensate the volume loss. I have a prtetty good suspicion your unit is misbehaving.
Hope you get the replacement quickly!
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