i believe i fixed it!

while fiddling with the wires to clean up the mess i was holding the stalk connecter and the empeg went into standby mode. so i played around with it by tapping the tip and it produced the same result. i also noticed that even if you wiggled it around it also made the empeg go into standby mode. some electrical tape around the stalk, zipties and more tape to secure it seem to have done the trick.

hopefully this fixed my problem and will fix yours to loren.