Hi all!
I've been working on a Gibson Triumph bass my mate brought in. When inspecting we noticed a yellow wire that was just loose in the cavity, only connected on on side to the ground of the jack.
Does anyone know where this wire need to go?
We 'guess' it was going to the bridge as no connection is made there..... yet, the wire is too short to reach the bridge.
On the pic you can spot the wire on the right coming off the jack
The yellow wire should not be soldered to the output jack. It should be soldered to the casing of the Volume pot. And it is indeed the ground wire coming from the bridge.
I doubt it matters much where the bridge is grounded. Do you even notice any noise induced in the circuit from the lack of that ground connection? Those low impedance pickups are less likely to pick up noise than their high impedance counterparts.
if the ground is not wired correctly it may create a ground loop.
Assuming that the instrument is properly grounded (all parts that require grounding is only grounded once) the bridge ground can not cause a loop if it is grounded once. Out of curiosity I looked up pics of the Triumph wiring and most of the bridge grounds were soldered to the input jack. The Les Paul "Recording" guitar however seems to be grounded at the volume pot casing like you mentioned Rob. Probably because the volume pot is closer in proximity to the bridge being located more forward on the guitar model.
I checked my Triumph. It has the yellow wire soldered to the Volume pot. But what really matters is that it should be connected to the bridge at the other end of the wire.
I thought ground loops were a misnomer in the context of guitars due to the low voltages involved?
A ground loop occurs when different parts of an electrical circuitry are connected to ground more than once. For example, if you connect your D.I box between amp and mixing console, the amp and mixing console are both connected to ground and their ground connections are tied together in the D.I box. That's a loop which can cause a hum by picking up electrical interference. Hence the ground lift option on many D.I boxes which seperates the grounds from each other.