High Pitched Squeal?

OK I thought I might had a bad tube since I had intermittent high pitched squeal coming from the speakers-headphones while not holding guitar strings, noise is not coming from the unit. Not feedback kind of noise, more like old radio tuning stations squeal if you know what I mean, it gets higher in pitch if I turn gain up and goes off completely if I turn gain a bit down or touch the strings.

Ordered new tubes, but squeal stopped and I thought OK, maybe it was something temporary, but yesterday I played with my new tubes and here comes the crazy squeal again. And I realized it goes away if I touch the handle of my amp?!? Not if I touch the chassis but only the damn metal handle on top of the amp, you can see in the pic below. But handle is welded in to the chassis...weird, makes no sense that noise stops only if I lightly touch the handle. Could it be that because handle is not painted, it conducts better and grounds me while I touch it?



Is this some king of grounding thing going on since I have amp on top of the Torpedo and I am playing next to it with all the power cables and speaker cable in one rack case? It is not constant, goes away and comes back completely random...am I picking something in the power lines?

Everything else sounds normal, the simulations and the amp sound amazing, just this weird noise comes up randomly.

There could be electromechanical coupling between 2 of the the amp, your pickups and the Torpedo.....ie something magnetic from one unit is exciting something electronic in another.

Try moving the units away from each other and/ or changing orientation. It could be the guitar is too close to the amp or Torpedo or perhaps the Torpedo and the amp need to be separated. It could be that this only happens with a certain guitar or amp. You shold n;t need to move things very far for the issue to be resolved.

I thought the same, will try moving things further apart tonight to see what happens. Weird thing is that it does not happen all the time, a mystery indeed.

Yeah I noticed this on my Live if my single coil loaded guitar was too close to the unit. Happens on my attenuator as well.

This could be two things :

- Indeed, magnetic feedback as explained just above. Keep your guitar away from the Live. But that may not be your issue.
- The other thing could be earth problem. If your amp and/or Live are not properly earthed, this kind of squealing sound may appear.

I moved amp away from the rack and had no squeal since, could be the amp proximity to the loadbox.

yes

Amps and especially power and output transformers in the amp are a huge mess of a magnetic field.

And even without a Torpedo, you can have you amp sing "La Marseillaise" just buy getting close to it with your guitar. ^^

As there is also a large coil in the Torpedo all these things tend to talk to each others even if we don't want to.

I could make it sound like Digitech Whammy effect with some pitch shifting, very controllable noise

But yeah, better have the amp bit further from the Torpedo.