pedal board advice

[antichef]

I'm starting to gig again, and now I'm using pedals - not many, but I had a dead battery screw me up once already, and now that I'm adding a wah and fuzz pedal and some others, I figure it's time to consider a pedal board with power. A friend recommended the voodoo labs power supply and I've been searching and see that it's sold a lot with the pedal train boards and cases, which seem nice. Strangely, there's no local dealer for Pedal Train in Houston, and so I can't go see them. I think I really want a hard case to go with the board.

I'm probably going to have these pedals: two distortion (one big and one normal sized, but with an additional tiny true-bypass pedal for it), one wah, one looper (small), one compressor (small), one fuzz (kind of big), and if I find a good reverb pedal and/or delay, then maybe those, also. *Maybe* a volume, and a channel switcher for an amp, which would need its own cord. So, like 10 pedals, ranging from big to small (jeez, 10? I guess so).

My questions for you guys -

How big of a board should I get? is 24" enough?

Is Pedal Train good enough to order sight unseen, any other ones to look at?

Is the voodoo labs power supply good, or are there alternatives?

If some of the pedals work best in an effects loop (one of my amps has one), and others don't, then that's three cords going to the amp, and with a channel switcher, that's 4 - seems unwieldy - any way to pull that off elegantly?

Does anyone use or recommend direct boxes for the run(s) to the amp?

 

[Greg_L]

The Guitar Centers carry Pedal Train boards. They are pretty decent, but the case is chintzy and weak.

You might wanna stick a tuner on the board too. That would be 11.

I don't know about Voodoo labs power supplies, but they all work pretty much the same. The VooDoo labs is a box, so that's one more thing you're gonna have to mount. A One-Spot is more stealth but it only does 9v. If you have an 18v pedal it won't work.

You can bundle your cables with straps, zip-ties, velcro strips, whatever. One of my guitarists has one bundle that runs from his board to his amp. Just strap the cables together every foot or so and it's just one thick cable running to the amp and you can split it off once it gets to the amp. Put some colored elec tape on the jacks for quick and easy hookups. Then just roll the whole thing up when done.

 

[antichef]

Makes sense - thanks

Today's my anniversary, and I got some nice earrings for ms chef, so she said we should go to a music store to get my present - that, my friends, doesn't happen often. I'll check out the boards there, and be mindful of the cases.

 

[antichef]

GC sells the pedal train "1" - not the smallest, but far from the biggest. That's all they stock, and since my window was narrow, I jumped on it. I also got the voodoo labs power thing with 8 outputs - it's mounted underneath. Yeah, Greg, the hard case is kinda chintzy, but fortunately I suck enough to not have to worry about doing any serious touring.

Already full - I still have to work with the cables to get everything to square up - I'll probably have to make at least one cable for that run from the Boss distortion back to the tremolo on the top middle. Also, the fuzz is still on battery, because it requires a reverse polarity cable that I'll have to find somewhere (GC doesn't stock those either). That would be all 8 of the power cables, but I still need to add a looper pedal (and a tuner?), so I guess one of them will have to stay with a battery - prolly the fuzz (and the tuner).

 

[Greg_L]

Cool. What you got going on there on the bottom right? Is that a splitter? What's your routing with all this stuff?

 

[antichef]

That thing is a simple true-bypass loop pedal (not one that plays recorded loops, but one that turns an effects loop on and off). I was using it to test whether there was any tone suck from the board - I don't detect any, which is great. The reason I got it was so that I could build the ultimate fuzz pedal out of this 1960s solid state practice amp, a mic, and an impedance converter. I think I'll put the amp guts/speaker, mic, and converter in some structure, hmmm... a drum? Anyway, the thought is to use the loop pedal to turn on and off routing through the cranked practice amp / mic / impedance converter.

The routing at this point (and it must be said that I have no idea what I'm doing, but this has been validated by some trial / error) is Octafuzz -> compressor -> Wah (I've tested this part of the sequence quite a bit - the fuzz *can't* come after the wah or it nullifies it, and this particular compressor has to be early in the chain or it sounds like ass) -> Full-Drive (overdrive) -> [heavily modified] Boss distortion -> (black cat) Tremolo -> (mojo hand recoil) Analog Delay -> (corona) chorus. If I get a reverb pedal, that would come after the chorus. The tuner would come first and the loop playing pedal would come last, I guess. If I play through the amp I have with an effects loop, I might break the sequence after the distortion, and route the latter group (tremolo through chorus and/or reverb/looper at some point) through the effects loop.

I have to figure out how not to use some of these so I don't have to get a bigger board. At this point, that should be easy since I don't really use any effects except for the overdrive, but I'll definitely use the wah, and I'll have to see about the others. I'm finding I don't like compression, at least with the amps and guitars I use most - so maybe that one can fall off.

 

[Greg_L]

It looks to me like you've got the order sorted pretty good in my opinion. Splitting the stuff you mentioned into an effects loop would probably be for the best as it's my experience and understanding that when available, time based stuff goes best in an effects loop.

 

[Tadpui]

One good thing about the PedalTrain is that it's designed to be able to mount a Voodoo Labs power supply on the underside, so it doesn't take up any space on your pedal board surface. Mine even came with mounting brackets specifically for the Voodoo power box. It takes a little drilling...

I cheaped out and went with an off-brand power supply that doesn't fit underneath so I have it taking up space on my board surface. It doesn't fit all that well.

I went with the PedalTrain 2, which is 26" I believe. I didn't think I'd use all of that space, but I have it close to maxed out. I use a wah, compressor, tuner, overdrive, plus footswitches for my amp and rackmount G-Sharp. That leaves space for one more single-spaced pedal. So you might want to consider the larger size (PedalTrain Pro, maybe?).