BEST and CHEAPEST PEDALBOARD options on AMAZON!!! (Donner vs Vangoa/Ghostfire)

hey guys welcome back to another episode of guns and guitars and you guys have been requesting for a long time for me to show you how to build a do-it-yourself pedal board and I am a DIY channel and that's something that's totally right up my alley the problem is as I'm researching how to do this I'm finding that you can't actually build a better pedal board than you can buy for the money okay so a lot of you guys have seen this pedal board floating around on my channel I built this thing just to get me by and there's a lot of reasons why this thing cannot compete with a real pedal board and I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a little bit but I thought a video that would better serve you guys is just a video that shows you the best budget and best value options for pedal boards that are out there you guys may not know that there are options out there that cost half the price of like gear cases or pedal train or some of those popular name-brand pedal boards so let's have a closer look at some of these lesser-known pedal boards and you guys will help me determine which one is the best value for you I'm Dan this is comes the guitars let's get started all right like I mentioned earlier I built this pedal board out of stuff I already had laying around my house just to kind of get me by but there's a lot of reasons why this thing it doesn't actually compete with a real pedal board firstly it's not made out of aluminum square tubing it's made out of solid wood from wood shelving which means it is very heavy compared to a normal pedal board it's also very bulky and the surface area where you can stick pedals is not very big so it does take up a lot of room but you don't fit a whole lot of pedals on it there's no grooves or channels to hide your power cables or audio cables so it all just sits on top there with the pedals so not to mention the fact that it kind of looks like death and sticks out like a sore thumb on a black stage and lastly if you don't already have this stuff laying around it's not gonna be free okay by the time you buy some wood shelving some carpet some hardware and some scrap wood and stuff to make it work you're looking at about the same price as what you pay for one of these budget options plus it's not gonna come with the accessories like a gig bag or cables or velcro and that kind of stuff so all in all you're not really gonna be saving a whole lot of money and you're gonna be having an inferior product so I'm gonna keep working on some different ideas on how to build a good DIY pedal board for less money than you can buy one and if I come up with something that's deserving of making a video I for sure will but until then let's just take a look at these cheapest pedal boards that you can get on Amazon so I went ahead and reached out to these Amazon sellers to see if they'd be willing to send me some sample products so we can kind of compare to see which ones are actually of the best value the first brand that I contacted was Donner and this is literally the cheapest brand that you can get on Amazon and I've got a good relationship with Donner I've reviewed some other products in the past so I can get pretty much anything I want from them at this point so of course they were willing to send me a couple pedal boards to try out the other brand that I contacted to try out is a brand called Vinoba and they make these ghost firebrand pedal boards and these are the next cheapest on Amazon and I think they're probably gonna be a good value and they were happy to send me just like Donner both they're cheapest option and what they feel like is their best option so I've got four pedal boards and total to compare we got the cheapest option from both brands and what they feel is the best option from both brands so let's go ahead and unbox these things real quick and get some initial impressions and then we'll load them up with some pedals okay gonna go ahead and start at the top of the list here this is the Donner DB - this one will only cost you 50 bucks and let's see what's in there all right so you a nice little briefcase style carry bag doohickeys for a shoulder strap we got some nice little rubber feet there for protection setting it down let's go ahead and see if there's anything in this pocket mmm got three all right so three yeah three cables just right-angle little 3-inch cables for connecting your pedals I don't know if they're any good but there's that shoulder strap it's this velcro okay so for connecting your pedals to the pedal board and here it is side down pull that out just barely fits in there so very basic oh did you hear that so apparently it doubles as a shaker cool so if your percussionist doesn't show up to a gig you're covered okay so this here is the ghost fire type-a and I believe this one runs $60 so just $10 more than that Donner so let's see what 10 more dollars will get you so looking at the case is kind of underwhelming actually just a carry handle no spot for shoulder straps no little rubber feet and some extra threads hanging out all right let's see what's on the inside there's no pocket so I don't know if there's accessories in this or not it's open it up oh there are just puck it on the inside I can already tell there's a hole right here so that didn't get so quite all the way but a little pouch for some accessories got some more velcro actually looks like it's nicer velcro maybe than what came with the donor oh these are zip ties and peel-and-stick zip tie mounts so you peel and stick these things to your pedalboard and then you can run a zip tie through it - zip zip down or cables or is it down with your pedals or something and then we've got movies look nice quite a bit more heavy-duty than the ones that came with so they do unscrew I like these kinds of connectors because if your cable gets a shorten it stops working you can pull the connectors off and just make a new cable out of whatever kind of wire you have laying around solder it up screwing back on you seem like good nice heavy-duty connectors so I'm happy to let that let me pull out at Donner one real quick to compare so here's the Donner one it's the sealed kind it's just rubber these are reusable so that's awesome so far I like the cables like the Velcro velcro is a little bit higher quality it comes with these zip ties and little peel and stick zip tie tie downs and then here's the actual pedal board look at that it's got a little foldable feet it's actually I don't know if it's picking up on the camera it's not quite black it's kind of a dark grey color so especially you compare it to this black of the case you can see there's actually kind of a dark gray color not necessarily a bad thing got the ghost fire logo right there just go ahead and cover that up with some gaff tape so that's kind of cool the bag is a little underwhelming obviously it's very cheap doesn't that it's made out of paper and then you got this hole right here but other than that I think the actual pedal board is good to go alright let's see what else we got okay this one here is the Donner db5 and this one comes in at $70 and so that'll be $10 more than the ghost fire $20 more than the first Donner one that we looked at and Donner's bags definitely win I mean look at this this feels like a quality case I mean especially for the price that you're paying you wouldn't expect that good quality like look at these rubber feet nice high quality I don't see any yeah there's no shoulder strap ties on this so this one probably don't have a shoulder strap either but it does look pretty nice looks to be the same accessories all right you got three more of those cheap cables it's some more velcro yeah I don't know what it is about this stuff it just it feels cheaper than the ghost fire stuff and I like the bags of the Donner woo this one has folding feet as well oh and they actually lock into place look at that so it's not just a detent holding it you actually have little push tabs to collapse that back put this thing over what the heck that's interesting I'm not sure if that's supposed to do that I don't know if that's supposed to be a feature if it's like adjustable doesn't make any sense I would just want it to kind of stay something like that it is just a Lumina more sheet metal or something so you can see what he couldn't just stick in a couple of sheet metal screws that would hold it in place but still come out of the package it just kind of slides around like that it's kind of weird got one more to look at and then we'll start velcro and these suckers up and seeing how many petals we can save alright so this here is the last one the ghost fire type see and I believe this one is $95 so quite a significant jump instead of just going up ten dollars from the other ones it goes up twenty-five dollars so the last one we did was seventy dollars and this one is I can already tell holy cow I was definitely underwhelmed by that first ghost fire bag I mean look at this look at the quality difference this thing feels like it's luggage it's got some rubber feet that's great does it have a shoulder strap I don't see a shoulder strap oh no way a backpack straps it's way better than shoulder strap you don't want those straps getting cotton stuff so that's cool you can kind of zip them up like that I mean this feels like high quality luggage let's see what this says superlight we are to choose the most light the most solid materials this is really good English waterproof fabrics used waterproof coating processing all right to present progressive verbs and rather perfect facilitate the most clever design to solve various problems for you major continuous improvement design adhere to bring better products for music lovers is our Gold Coast fire music dot China that's terrible English that's such a nice placard but such terrible English they must not realize that you can just go on Fiverr and like pay an American or someone that's British to write it out and like half decent English that is actually coherent let's see what's not you it's blue and doesn't have any holes in it like the other one did that's good news some metal brackets velcro ties zip ties and again those little peel and stick zip tie mounts oh no cables in this one okay this one even has a bubble wrap on the inside look at that even have like this like cool little like tight I don't know it's probably not gonna do anything but it feels cool ooh this one's actually welded would you look at that it's some nice welds going on man this one's actually welded together the other ones I just have like little elbows that are glued together but this one's actually welded it feels quite a bit heavier of course it is bigger so no collapsible feet there's your ghost fire logo and I've got a couple of grommets here you must be able to punch those out to run your power cables and stuff through so yep so you punched those out to run your power cables or your effects boot I don't know guys I was a little disappointed in that first ghost fire one but this one well I got to keep in mind that the first ghost fire one was like half the price of this one so this one is 95 comes with a much better case the pedal board is good this one had a good pedal board just the case was not great good pedal board good accessories it's not a great case all right after having looked at those i've already formulated some opinions on which one i think is the best value but why don't we go ahead and load it up with some velcro and then stick as many of these pedals as we can on there just to see which one actually is the best value this thing is extremely small and if you're like me you might have some archaically sized pedals that you just can't bear to let go of so if I was to rig this thing up with my normal gig rig it would look something like that this really isn't a bad gig rig just these pedals I played like this for a long time with only compression tuning volume and delay I've only recently gotten into some more effects but this is not a bad gig rig and the pedal board does hold it all just fine it is ready to go obviously my super huge volume pedal there wouldn't even in that little tiny case but if you're not like me and you don't have these like super huge ridiculous pedals that are way outdated and you've just got some smaller pedals let's see what we can actually fit on here and we're actually gonna go ahead and connect this stuff with cables cuz it doesn't count unless you can actually connect it with cables [Music] that's pretty good-looking gig rig so we got compression tuning overdrive octave EQ tremolo reverb and delay all in all that's one two three four five six seven eight pedals yes that's not too bad so what I would probably do is if I were gigging and I needed my volume pedal I would just go ahead and just I'd carry this separate in my gig bag and just put it right there next to this and bam that's not a bad looking pedal board we've got some standard sized pedals we got some mini pedals and then we've got these which are kind of mini standard pedals I guess this is the $60.00 one and as you can see for $10 more you get a ton more real estate also enough velcro to cover every inch of this thing I was very happy about that I think we're gonna be able to fit a lot of pedals on there but let's go ahead and start with the obvious let's start with my old-school gig rig so if I were to do something like this because I have a nice slanted angle I have no problem sticking my dl4 in sideways kiss and be able to hit all these no problem without risky and hitting them two at a time or whatever yeah and I still have plenty of real estate here for some more effects so let's see this makes me really excited because this gig rig right here I actually played with this week I gigged with this exact same pedal layout so compressor tuner full-size volume full size dl4 with the Mauritian verb moon octa and a black devil and I was a really cool rig I definitely got a lot of really good tone out of it and this fits all on here no problem so that's pretty sweet obviously if I could arranged it a little bit better I might have been able to fit some more let's go ahead and pull off those huge pedals and see if we can't fit all these pedals on here on this $60.00 pedal board I literally fit every pedal I own except for the DL 4 and the volume pedal so that is an excellent value guys look at that you can fit a lot of pedals on that holy cow alright let's have a look now at the Donner db5 alright so I just noticed something about this ghost fire pedal board when I brought out the Donner db5 to compare the two as you can see these two are literally the exact same size so I'm not gonna bother seeing how many pedals we can fit on this we'll just assume it's the same as this so when I line them up like this you can see the Donner actually stands just a little bit taller so it has a more aggressive slant to it also just remember that these things were loose they're being held together by Velcro at the moment these things were not these were glued securely in place with whatever connectors they are using and this one got velcro over every square inch and you'll notice here on this one that again Donner shorted us on the velcro so I would love to have more to go right up here and right here this was actually one of these thick pieces that I cut into so that I had enough to go back in the cross on both of these I wish I could have still had that thick piece to put right there and then I could wrap it around and I would just make sure that the velcro stays on a little more secure having extra surface area to hold on to but like I said they didn't give it in the kit and I am reviewing this kit so I would like to see a little more velcro donor just for future references so like I said we're gonna that too of the exact same size pedalboards can hold the exact same equipment so we'll just go ahead and move on to the other ghost fire pedal board that's this one right here this is the ghost fire type seat and as you can see pretty significantly bigger all right let's go ahead and load this up with my gig rig need to connect him with cables or it doesn't count now the reason why I keep saying that you guys probably wondering why doesn't it count if you look at lots of manufacturers photographs of their pedal boards you'll notice that they'll have a ton of pedals lined up but none of them have any cables connected to them no cables for audio no cables for power and you really have to take that stuff into consideration because that stuff takes up a lot of room on a pedal board I should probably also mention that I am in no way sponsored or endorsed by Planet Waves I'm just shocked that you can get three high-quality lifetime warranty cables for less than $10 on Amazon that's cheaper than any of the knockoff brands like monoprice and like those other ones more Planet Waves is actually a reputable manufacturer they actually have a reputable lifetime warranty and you can get three of their cables and as you can see it's longer than your typical three inch cables that come three inch cables this is a three inch cable there's a Planet Waves cable so it's actually more like a five or six inch cable maybe and super pliable and they're just perfect for these pedal board setups so I can't say enough good things about him I've had him for a while and I haven't had any issues but if I did I would just send it back and they would send me a new one you know this video should be called should be called Dan plays Tetris with pedals for an hour alright folks there you have it took me about 15 minutes to figure it out but this is every single petal I own including the DL 4 and the full-size volume pedal that take up a ridiculous amount of real estate and it all fits on the board just fine well I'm hanging off the edge here just a little bit but so $95 for this one and look at how many pedals you can fit on it that's ridiculous that that's like a pedal train that's legit wonder if I can fit it in the case like that let's find out yeah buckle it in there for safety fits in the case just fine look at that I did not expect to like the ghost fire stuff as much as I like it now I've got to say I had some opinions before I went ahead and loaded those things up with Velcro and pedals and I have to say after I did that my opinions on these pedal boards actually drastically changed hopefully you guys are letting me know in the comments which one you guys think is the best value based on what I've shown you so far but I'll go ahead and tell you what I think what I think is that all four of these pedal boards are a great value and it just depends on what you need them to do for example if you're like the way I used to be and you tried to just keep a really small pure signal chain you limited your signal chain to like maybe four or five maybe even six pedals and that's not to say that you don't have more pedals than that what that means is that when you buy a pedal it's usually to replace a pedal not in addition to a pedal in your signal chain okay if that's you then one of these $50 dollars will actually get you by okay it's not very big but it does hold a decent amount of pedals and it comes with a nice carrying case and some accessories and for 50 bucks I really do think it's a good value now likely if you can afford a $50 pedal board you can afford a $60 pedal board then I would definitely consider getting this ghost fire one okay cuz for just $10 more you get a significantly better pedal board you get more velcro and better accessories like these heavier duty cables that you can desaad er and remake if they ever short out and so this is the option that I would probably choose as the best value now my one concern about this product is the chintzy bag that it comes with so if you're looking for a pedal board this size and a bag is a concern then you might want to consider spending yet another $10 more just to get a better bag because remember this donor pedal board right here is the exact same size as that ghost fire one but it comes with a much nicer heavier duty carry bag and it comes with the same accessories I will admit that I like the ghost fire cables a little bit better than these but it is cool that it does come loaded with those accessories it's the same size and comes with a much better carrying and gig bag then it goes fire one for just $10 more now if you are a regular gigging musician and you are hauling your gear around a lot and you're one of those people that's like I need every effect ever then the clear winner is the type-c ghost fire because it's again not that much more money and it's a way bigger pedal board I can't even fit on camera in front of my face and the case is so nice with the backpack straps that can be hid in it feels like quality it feels like like Samsonite luggage or something so like I said it's really difficult for me to determine which one's gonna be the best value for you but I think if I were to choose one it would probably have to be the ghost fire type-a because for sixty dollars you really get a lot of bang for your buck it's got more embedder accessories and it's a quite a bit bigger than the $50 dollar one the only thing you have to watch out for is that cheap chintzy gig bag that it comes with that's clearly how they were able to undercut the more expensive Donner one by ten dollars is just by chipping out on the gig bag now if you're watching this video and you saw all these pedals that I was attaching to these pedal boards you're probably wondering like what the heck are those pedals well those pedals are what I feel like are the best value pedals that you can get on the market right now and I have them for you in a playlist right here so be sure to check them out and I'm just on a quest to find the best tone on a budget so be sure to subscribe as I come up with these different ways that you can really stretch your dollar to get the best tone possible I'm Dan this is Gunz aquitar thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Guns and Guitars

Views: 221,467

Keywords: pedalboard, budget pedalboard, diy pedalboard, best pedalboard, best budget pedalboard, donner, donner db-2, donner db-5, vangoa, ghostfire, donner pedalboard, ghostfire pedalboard, vangoa pedalboard, pedaltrain, pedal train, gator cases, behringer pedalboard, gator cases pedalboad, pedal, board, budget pedals, budget effects, budget effects pedals, efects pedals

Id: 9vkrhRbHNsY

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018