New pedal board project for 2018.

Hey Everyone,

I've got a new pedal board project scheduled for 2018, this time I'm going to be downsizing my pedal chain to make it a bit simpler, as a result the pedal board is going to be smaller than the first one I built.

For those of you interested, here's what the fx chain for the new pedal board is going to be:

Going into my Marshall MA100C amp set to it's clean channel, the fx chain goes like this....Guitar, Jim Dunlop JD-F2 Fuzz Face, Jim Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Wah, Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer.

And in the Marshall's FX Loop...Boss CH-1 Super Chorus, Boss RE20 Space Echo.

I can also add some spring-reverb from my Marshall amp if I want.

This also gives me the option to use the Marshall's overdrive channel in both Crunch and Boosted-Overdrive mode too, so I can set Boosted-Overdrive to get that edge of breakup tone, and then use the TS-9 or Fuzz Face to drive it harder.

Sounds great! Look forward to seeing the build.

I’m always confused by pedals and their relative positions to each other. I’ve only really ever had a blues driver and a flanger both of which are now gone. Will watch with interest Doc.

The pedalboard struggle is real! Hah. Good luck on downsizing. It’s hard.

https://i.imgur.com/yIsIoMo.jpg

Holy massive

Your new chain should cover most bases there Doc...

I'm a bit more all or nothing with pedals...

On the AC18W I near always go bare foot... just the guitar, the tubes (and built in tremolo) and the cab doing all the work.. if I get enthusiastic I might chuck pedal on, usually a cheap reverb or delay..

On the JVM210 it's often everything so I don't have to muck around patching... purely so I can experiment quickly and do it loud.... In the typical order which I prefer - Dunlop Hendrix signature Wah, TC Polytune 3, TS9, Big Muff, the JVM's 6 mode pre-amp, TC Sub-n-up, TC Helix phaser, Behringer UC200 chorus, TC Vortex flanger, Catalinbread Echorec, NUX time core, Digitec Trio and finally the JVM's 100W PA with digital reverb ... Not a practical or regular setup but it can be/do anything from totally awesome to a horrid ugly audio mess, and when there is a few hours to kill and nobody is around to complain it is a huge lot of fun too...

I'm thinking of buying a new Jim Dunlop Eric Johnson signature Fuzz Face and maybe a Barracuda Flanger next year, reason being is that I am interested in getting some Eric Johnson tones, might even see if I can get a set of Eric Johnson signature pickups for my Fender Strat while I'm at it.

I'm lusting after a Kink Pedals Trem-endous Gain Overdrive/Tremolo pedal. I have their Charlie Fuzz and its brilliant. Not sure I'll need a board for 2 pedals though.....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FrankenWashie

I'm lusting after a Kink Pedals Trem-endous Gain Overdrive/Tremolo pedal. I have their Charlie Fuzz and its brilliant. Not sure I'll need a board for 2 pedals though.....

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They sound cool, I had a Danelectro Cool Cat Tremolo pedal that sounded really nice, but some moisture got into it and caused some corrosion, I tried to open it up so I could give it a service but the screws were all seized-up.

They are good gear. I just need to get a better amp combo or stack to do it some justice. Oh Well. Next christmas!

Recently built a mini pedalboard - volume, compressor, micro preamp, micro reverb, digital delay then looper. Will insert a drive after compressor after I finish building it. Whole thing fits into a laptop bag.


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My latest pedalboard version. Re-did it all using 3M Dual-Lock (the stronger adhesive version). Expensive stuff (much dearer than Velcro) but worth it. I was fed up with the Velcro peeling off the base of the pedals over time. This stuff is a lot more secure and there's also no play when the pedals are stuck down.

I also made up all my own patch leads. I had been using George L's patch cables, but having the need to make some new ones up found that they were a) unreliable and b) had varying resistances on the signal core from between 0.3 ohms to near 100 ohms (generally in the 10 ohm region). So they went in the bin and I soldered up my own, all with 0.1 ohm (the lower reading my multimeter will give) connections.

The Nano Big Muff is the latest addition and replaced a couple of Andertons' Tone City drive pedals as I had ended up with 4 pedals all sounding very similar to one another.

The Line 6 Echo Park has also reappeared and replaces a TC Flashback, as the L6's tap tempo is a lot easier to use than the Flashback's strum tempo feature. The Korg Pitchblack Mini replaces a TC Polytune Mini that I really didn't like. The poly mode gave different in/out of tune readings to the individual note mode, and the individual note mode kept swapping to the poly mode even though being very careful to just sound one string.

(Apologies for the poor picture).

Attachment 23858

All on a Pedaltrain Nano 18 board with 2 x Voodolabs PedalPower 2 PSUs

While I was experimenting with my two Wah pedals to decide which one was going on my new pedal board, I found that my Jimi Hendrix Wah needed some TLC work done on it to get it working at it's best, at first, I couldn't get any sound through it which turned out to be caused by the 9V battery being flat, I swapped it out for a new one and that restored sound, next I found that the Foot-Switch needed adjusting, but, since my Jimi Hendrix Wah pedal has a small Fet Buffer board that's going to be removed anyway, I'm going to leave working on it till I can buy a couple of new 3PDT footswitches from Jaycar Electronics, one is going to replace the stock footswitch in the Jimi Hendrix Wah, the other one is going to replace the stock footswitch in the Crybaby Wah.

It might be a good idea to stop off at my local Bunnings store while I'm at it to buy the materials needed for the new pedal board.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Simon Barden

My latest pedalboard version. Re-did it all using 3M Dual-Lock (the stronger adhesive version). Expensive stuff (much dearer than Velcro) but worth it. I was fed up with the Velcro peeling off the base of the pedals over time. This stuff is a lot more secure and there's also no play when the pedals are stuck down.

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Good tip - might go buy some tomorrow. Nicely arranged board too.

A mate of mine uses George L cables on his pedal board and was always having issues with them, he wants me to go through and solder all the cables for him, personally I think soldered joints in cables are the best, a lot of those George L cables use some kind of grub-screw mechanism to make the electrical connections between the cable conductors and the plugs, over time, these connections do have a habit of working lose, soldered-connections, if done properly, don't come lose.

A lot of well-known people were using them when I bought my first George L's cables. (I was using the thin ones designed for pedal boards) Not sure if the first lot were better made than the recent additions, but the new lot were just terrible. They don't have a grub screw, the coax cable is just pushed onto a spike at the bottom of the jack body, the cable then bent over so it angles out of a slot in the body, then a cap screwed down to finish pushing the centre wire on the spike and help keep everything in place.

It's all very hit and miss and you can't test just one end at a time as you'd never get a good connection with the thin signal wire in the middle of the coax cable (the cable is simply cut straight across - no stripping back). So you have to put both ends on, then test the resistance of the signal cable (I found that the shield was always very good), and if it's high, pull it apart, snip a bit off both ends of the cable, and try again.

By comparison, I did have some Planet Waves solderless patch cables which do use a grub screw, and they were very good - all had a minimal resistance. But they are very expensive, so I ordered a whole lot of right-angles pancake jacks and some decent cable, and soldered up 15 patch leads.

FYI, the signal flow arrangement is right to left on each level, starting with the Cry Baby Mini, but with the TC Spark Mini as the last pedal (fed from the Boss reverb) as a boost for solos. By adding a couple of extra patch leads I can run the chorus. delay and reverb in stereo if I want to, with the boost on only one channel.

I'm keen to try the new OpAmp Big Muff from EHX - I have always been a huge fan of the supersaturated fuzz tones on the Pumpkins' Siamese Dream

Decided to give the Marshall the night off and spent a good portion of last night going pedal less into a half decent sized modelling amp. A VOX VT40X hooked up to a PC running Toneroom with my denim Tele, the plywood strat, the ES-1TL and my Gibson LP to add to the variety ....

I was suitably impressed to say the least. Switching from a 'Wish you were here' sound to a 'Pride' sound, and then "Cocaine', and then a 'Walk this way' tone plus 56 other very usable and authentic sounding pre-sets (like 'Paranoid') and 8 user defined pre-sets at the click of a mouse is a lot of fun, particularly when there is a quite respectable 40W pushing a 1x10 vented cab. And of course everything is instantly adjustable by the mouse or scroll wheel...

My fretting hand has new blisters on my fingertips now ... so it might just be the polishing rag in the other hand for most of today ... and I'll be considering my options if I really need to keep the Marshall and all those pedals I have ...

I have my beheaded VTX20 on the desk for use with headphones for late night noodling sessions. I've saved a few presets of my own and there are times when the the thought of dragging the pedal board out, running cables and fiddling with pedals all sounds like too much effort. Much to be said for the modellers.

Attachment 23869
Vs
Attachment 23868

The bride gave me some plans for a pedal board that she said I should build for myself. This is how it turned out.......https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...255c19c2c4.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...d8425fa280.jpg

I'm beginning to suspect it might not have been a pedal board after all.....


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Was just playing my Fender Strat through my Marshall amp with just my red Fuzz Face and my TS-9 (in that order) going into the Marshall set to it's clean channel, it's a bit of an old school way of doing distortion, but geez you can get some pretty cool tones out of it, you get lots of controllable feedback which you can control via the guitar's volume control, I found that there are a few sweet spot settings for the volume control, and you can also control the pitch of the feedback note just by manipulating the trem-bar.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DrNomis_44

Was just playing my Fender Strat through my Marshall amp with just my red Fuzz Face and my TS-9 (in that order) going into the Marshall set to it's clean channel, it's a bit of an old school way of doing distortion, but geez you can get some pretty cool tones out of it, you get lots of controllable feedback which you can control via the guitar's volume control, I found that there are a few sweet spot settings for the volume control, and you can also control the pitch of the feedback note just by manipulating the trem-bar.

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Cool! I really need the upgrade the amp set up this year, I have persisted with small modeling amps, maybe it’s time to upgrade and get pedalling?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FrankenWashie

The bride gave me some plans for a pedal board that she said I should build for myself. This is how it turned out.......https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...255c19c2c4.jpg
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...d8425fa280.jpg

I'm beginning to suspect it might not have been a pedal board after all.....


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Hahahaha....I think there were ulterior motives, judging by the results.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DrNomis_44

Hahahaha....I think there were ulterior motives, judging by the results.

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I thought the dowels were to hang the patch leads from? 🤪

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FrankenWashie

I thought the dowels were to hang the patch leads from? 🤪

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Yeah, I thought so too, then I thought that maybe the dowels were supposed to be removed so that you could feed power to each of the pedals.

Apart from the solid board at one end. it looks like a prototype for some Ashes-winning cricket stumps that won't fall over. ;)

The board is to protect your tootsies from Yorkers maybe?

Looks like some medieval torture device....

I'm going to be adding two more distortion pedals to my new pedal board, here's the revised pedal chain:

Going into my Marshall's input:

Guitar, Jim Dunlop JD-F2 Fuzz Face, Jim Dunlop JH-1 Jimi Hendrix Wah, Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer, Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, Boss MT-2 Metal Zone.

The Marshall's FX Loop:

Boss CH-1 Super Chorus, Boss RE-20 Space Echo.

I haven't really been following this thread. I clicked on it and saw that contraption and was well confused :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sonic Mountain

I haven't really been following this thread. I clicked on it and saw that contraption and was well confused :D

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I know how you feel, those things poking out the side really threw me for a loop so to speak, at first I thought they were some kind of cosmic-energy collectors for channeling unearthly guitar tones, but then thought nah.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sonic Mountain

I haven't really been following this thread. I clicked on it and saw that contraption and was well confused :D

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Just some humour Sonic, it’s a thread and sewing project caddy for the bride. One of the other projects the FrankenLab was required to complete in order to negate any potential guitar project embargo’s.

Humor is very much welcome in my threads, we all have to be able to laugh at something.

Update:

Thought that it was time to post an update, so here we go.....


Okay, I've recently been doing some revising of my pedal-board setup, mainly to downsize it a bit so that it's simple enough even for me to get up and running....haha.


Here's a pic of what my current pedal board setup looks like:

Attachment 25934


I'm actually using a pedal board case that Recently bought from my local Pro Music shop, it has a kind of 50's Fender Tweed covering on it that I think looks cool.


So, here's a brief synopsis of my pedal board and how I've got my signal-chain set up:


Going into my Marshall MA100C's input:


Guitar into my Pitchblack + Tuner, then into the Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer, then into my Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, then into my Jim Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Wah, and then finally into my Marshall amp.


Marshall Amp FX Loop:


From the FX Loop Send it goes into the input of my Boss RE 20 Space Echo pedal, then into my DIY Univibe, then into my Boss CH-1 Super Chorus, and then finally to the FX Loop Return on the Marshall amp.

Update:

Did yet another revision of my pedal board yesterday, mainly to re-arrange the pedals so I could make room for my big red Jim Dunlop JD-F2 Fuzz face, which I really wanted to use, anyway, this is what I came up with:

Attachment 26762


One thing is certain, you're never truly satisfied when it comes to the placement of the pedals on your pedal board.

Since I'm using a clip-on Snark tuner, I decided to eliminate the pitchblack tuner from the pedalboard, the Fuzz Face doesn't really like being driven by a buffer, which the pitchblack has in it's output, it's also supposed to be very picky on what comes after it too, I'm still making the Jimi Hendrix Wah the last pedal in the chain before going into the Marshall amp though.

I might change-up the order of the pedals going in the Marshall's FX loop too, but I first need to sort-out a hum issue in my Univibe pedal.