The Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger Review

We live in an electrically noisy place.  Phantom hums and radio stations and static are commonplace when I plug in my guitars to my amps and begin to wail.  I’ve tried noise decimators in the past, but they sucked tone out of the chain, and so I’ve just had to live with turning down the Gain and putting up with that humming and noise.

Then, the other day, a friend of mine recommended the Hum Debugger from Electro-Harmonix.  The purpose of the pedal is dead nut simple:

Every musician battles hum in their signal chain. The Hum Debugger turns it into dead silence, courtesy of a little EHX magic. Not a noise gate, and not a noise suppressor — but a real hum extractor. Silence is golden.

I ordered a Hum Debugger and I plugged it in the day it arrived.  This pedal is magical.  If there’s any noise in my chain, I just turn it on and the noise goes away without adversely affecting the tone of my guitar.  There are no complicated steps  for setup:

NORMAL/STRONG TOGGLE SWITCH – Sets the amount of Hum Elimination. In NORMAL mode the Hum Debugger removes only the odd harmonics from the hum present in your signal. In STRONG mode the Hum Debugger removes both odd and even harmonics from your signal’s hum content.

STATUS LED – When the LED is lit the Hum Debugger is active. When the LED is off the Hum Debugger is in True Bypass mode.

FOOTSWITCH – Toggles the Hum Debugger between active and True Bypass modes.

CONNECTIONS – Connect your instrument to the INPUT Jack. Connect your amplifier or the rest of your effects chain to the AMP Jack.

Here’s a great real-life review of the pedal:

It feels powerful to finally be able to just click a switch and have all that noise and gunk go away as if you were waving a magic wand.  If you have a guitar hum problem — coming from your guitar or amp or some other electrical bugaboo — in my experience, the Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger is the perfect pedal solution for you and worth every penny you spend to buy one.