If you’ve had enough with the annoying, humming sound in your guitar, you’re probably going to love this hack on how to shield a guitar with aluminum foil.
Aluminum foil for guitar shielding is one of the few ways you can do to protect your guitar from the interference of electromagnetic waves. Don’t you just love it when you’re jamming with your guitar and no unwanted noise comes off it?
This is the article that could get you that solution. Here’s the step by step guide on how to shield electric guitars:
Step 1: Prepare The Tools
You can’t do any guitar shielding aluminum foil tricks without first preparing the essential kit, which includes a knife, masking tape, two-sided tape, a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil, a bus wire and a Phillips screwdriver.
Step 2: Encasing The Outside Electronics
The next step would be to cover the all the electronics in your guitar with aluminum, which includes covering the pickup and all the exterior areas with foil.
Step 3: Removing Electronics
The next step to shielding guitars is to remove the pickup itself, so you can get in there to coat the inner surfaces. You could also shield the strat but make sure that the all the electronics are connected to the pickguard first.
When shielding a stratocaster, you may need to remove the pickguard if the guitar’s electronics isn’t completely connected to it, so you can expose the cavity.
Step 4: Coat the Toggle Switches
A thorough aluminum foil shielding should make sure that even the remote toggle switches are coated with the aluminum. You also need to make sure that the cavity holding the tremolo springs are foiled tight using a double-sided tape.
You need to double-check, too, that the cavities you coated with the aluminum are connected to the output jack’s aluminum coating.
Use the knife to cut small portions of the foil to suit the actual size of these areas. For an added reference on the details on how to do this part, refer here:
Step 5: Shielding the Covers
Shielding foil for the covers means you coat the the side facing the electronics. Just make sure though that when you do this part, its aluminum coating will be connected with the cavity’s aluminum coating.
After doing this you need to ground the shield using a bus wire, a tape and a soldering iron to connect it to the volume pot’s back. For detailed information on that, refer to this video:
Step 6: Reinstall the Electronics
Once you’re done with the pickguard shielding, you need to install the electronics back to their original positions, but before replacing the screws, make sure you eliminate the ground loops first by removing the ground wires found attached on the back of the pots.
Conclusion
As a summary of this aluminum homemade paint shield, here are the steps: prepare your tools first, encase the electronics, remove them to get into the cavities and coat them with foil before reinstalling them to their original position.
And that’s it! Simple, right? We hope you enjoyed this guide on how to shield a guitar with aluminum foil!