The Steel Guitar Forum

My pedal board that I use for guitar not for steel all the boxes are making a sound like a heart beat when I step on them. My tuner first in the chain doesn’t make the heart beat sound. My power source is a Hotspot 9 volt. Cables a George Ls. I have four stop boxes after my tuner. All my pedals are not that old. Would appreciate any help. Thinking it could be the Hotspot 9 volt?

Have you tried different outlets in your house?

Hey Billy, if you're using a single 9V power supply and daisy chaining it to power up several pedals, that can cause all kinds of weird noise. The TrueTone One Spot is a good power supply for a single pedal, although anything can go bad. It's possible that one pedal is putting noise into the rest of them back thru the power daisy chain, even when it's bypassed. Or you may be exceeding the current limit of your power supply, and it's cycling on and off. You can remove one pedal at a time from your signal chain to identify the culprit, but separate power supplies to each pedal is the best way to go. Something like a One Spot Pro or Voodoo Labs Pedal Power has isolated power for multiple pedals and fixes a lot of mysterious noise and interference problems.

The charger for my line 6 wireless for 6-string guitars makes a noise like that when it is charging. I have to hit the tuner bypass to stop it.
I have gone to Truetone 1 SPOT PRO CS6 6-output Low-profile Isolated Guitar Pedal Power Supplies for guitar and steel.
Some newer pedals need more power than others.
I noticed a sound improvement after ditching the daisy chain power supply.

Since no one asked...........

What pedals are you using?
That will tell us their voltage requirements, current requirements, AC or DC, etc etc etc.

What is the order?

And.......

I did a Google search for a "Hot Spot power supply".
Nothing really turned up that I thought was the item you are using.
I/we have no idea what this item is.
So, do you have a link for this item?

Have you tried removing individual pedals? Process of elimination. Maybe one is putting the heartbeat noise in the system... I had a tremolo do this with a switching power supply (like the Hotspot).

Thanks guys it turned out the Hotspot 9 volt was the problem. Thanks again