Summary
A DiMarzio Cruiser humbucker and running a grounding wire from the tailpiece to the output jack ground greatly reduced this mandolin's buzzing and humming.
Details
Since I had trouble finding specific recommendations for dealing with this, I thought I'd post my experience and results, in case someone else runs into the same problem.
I am picking up a mandolin part in a new project. The Ibanez M510E looked like a cost-effective solution. I have been very pleased with my Ibanez parlor guitar, and this is a similarly impressive value.
However, at home, there are some EM sources that produce a lot of noise in single-coil pickups, like the ones that came in this mandolin and in my son's low-end Strat, that produce a lot of pickup noise. I was also getting ridiculous levels of 60Hz hum.
My first attempt to fix the problem was to just run an external grounding wire from the tailpiece to the output jack. The mandolin then sounded a little cleaner at home when I touched the strings, and it was pretty clean altogether at our rehearsal space, but I wanted to clean things up even more in case the issues I have at home occur at a show.
So... humbucker time. I chose the DiMarzio Cruiser since it's billed as a neck pickup and the M510E pickup is near the neck. Further, since the string spacing of the mandolin is different than a guitar, I was unsure whether a six-post design would provide even sound. The DiMarzio seemed more agnostic to string position. Also, it matched the black coloring of the stock pickup and DiMarzio seems to have a decent reputation.
The stock M510E pickup looks like it is a standard size, but it is actually narrower than the DiMarzio Cruiser. So, it took a bit of X-acto knife work to widen the opening in the pick guard, almost to the edges of the pickup mounting screw holes. It worked, though.
I chose the parallel wiring scheme (red/white/ground and green/black tied) since it was described as being cleaner and less noisy.
I still had noise after the initial installation. Note that I had removed the external grounding wire since it was ugly, in the hope that the humbucker alone would solve the issue. It didn't. I went through a process of eliminating the tone pot and then even the volume pot to isolate the issue. I am left suspicious that my output jack was properly wired at all to start, but, I decided to add back the grounding wire, this time internally.
I removed the tail piece and drilled a small hole in the far upper right corner of the top surface. I then reinstalled the tail piece and drilled through that hole and through the top of the mandolin. I then fed a wire through that hole and out the output jack hole. (The output jack was hanging outside at this point.)
I twisted a knot into the tailpiece end of the wire and secured it with some solder. I then soldered the other end to the ground side of the tailpiece jack and reinstalled.
Now, when my hands are in contact with the strings, the mandolin is as quiet as I could hope. At home, there is still some noise if my hands are off the strings. I attribute this to lack of shielding of the overall signal chain. Also, the noise is now low enough that a reasonably set noise gate suppresses it adequately when my hands are not in contact with the strings.
Since the tailpiece/string grounding was free, I'd give that a shot first. It wasn't enough in my case, though. The DiMarzio, to my ear, sounds much crisper and cleaner than the stock pickup anyway, so I'm happy. It can be had for ~$72 with a Musician's Friend discount coupon.
(The other option is to just buy that beautiful Kentucky KM-1050 F-style that you really want and install a piezo pickup, and forget all of this magnetic pickup nonsense. Still under consideration.)
I hope this helps someone at some point. If I happen to try shielding at some point, I'll follow up. I am not sure how I'd do it, though, with the pretty limited access to the body cavity.
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