Pedal boards

Hi!

A new day with a new post :-). This time it's about pedal boards. I've been planning, working and testing for quite a while now with a new pedal board that I have built myself. I will tell you about that another day so let's start with the old board. This is it:

Digitech Whammy 4, Morley Bad Horsie 2 Wah, Morley PVO volume.

Electroharmonix POG 2, G-Lab GSC-2.

I don't know how much you know about guitar gear so I'll try to explain a little more in depth in my blog posts. Please don't hesitate to ask questions!

So, what is a pedal board? And why should you use one? In the beginning of one's guitar career the number of pedals used is not that many, if any. The first type of effect you buy is most likely some sort of distortion or overdrive pedal or a multi effect of some kind. At this stage the world is easy and the setup might look something like this:

That means that every time you set your guitar rig up or take it apart you simply place the pedal on the floor, connects one guitar cord from guitar to pedal input and another one from pedal output to amp input then you are done. Piece of cake :-). But if you are interested in creating different types of sounds and exactly getting the sound you want, it might soon start to look like this on the floor:

This will be much more cumbersome and slow to set up and take apart. A lot of cables that has to be connected together in the same order without the nobs on the pedals moving around and therefore changing the sound. It's also a good idea to start thinking about powering the pedals with some sort of power adapter instead of with batteries. The solution to all of this chaos is of cause the pedal board:

There exists many variations, but here is a common construction. The pedal board is some sort of hard board that is covered with velcro. The pedals are also covered with velcro on the underside. All the pedals are then layed out on the board and connected with as short connecting cables as possible. The order of the pedals is crucial for the sound you want and you have to decide during the mounting of the board. The pedals are then pressed to the board and slightly twisted so that the velcro on the pedal gets it's hooks into the velcro on the board. The power supply for the pedals is also normally fastened on the pedal board and connected to all the pedals. When the board is fully assembled you can turn it upside down, carry it around etc and the pedals will remain in their places. The board is then normally transported in a suitable case.

So the pedal board is, in principal, one big custom made multi effects pedal. Even though you now have a lot of sounds at your feet, it's still easy and quick to set up and take apart your guitar rig. You only need to connect one cord from the guitar to the input of the first pedal on the board, and one from the output of the last pedal to the amp. Now you also need to connect the power adapter to socket as well. Just one more cable!

And as usual you can complicate stuff even more, but I will not get into that now. Now it's time to sleep.

Rock on!!