Building My Dream Pedalboard

okay so over the past few months since I put out my first pedal board mistake video I begin a lot of questions about people asking when am I gonna fix the board when am I gonna build a new board so I'm finally ready to do the follow-up for the past two months I've been weighing my options and I've come to what I think will be the perfect end all be all pedal board so in today's video we're not just gonna fix the issues with the board we're gonna completely rebuild it from the ground up and we should end up with what I think will be my dream pedal board so my first step is to break this board down okay so the pedal board is broken down next step I need to go actually pick up my new pedal board and a couple of different supplies for this build that we're gonna need and I'm meeting up with a really good friend of mine who's gonna help us out with this build so I've got to go [Music] so I ended up coming all the way out to Oakland California for this pedal board build so my friend Mason Marin Gela from vertex effects could help me put this board together and I'm incredibly excited because I've been drooling over vertex boards literally for years this is kind of a big deal for me I'm really really excited let's go outside and take a look at what we're gonna be doing everyone Mason turn off this music so you know Zeke shop dog from vertex so Mason and I have been talking about this board build for a few weeks now kind of going back and forth and trying to figure out the philosophy and what we wanted to do dude you want to kind of walk them through like what we've figured out yeah so we're we're basing the whole thing around the switching system the the boss cs5 didn't allow us to have five pills in the loop it's going to allow us to use this what we're calling the Strymon bridge which is going to be attached on a on a metal lift that's going to mount into the board and this is going to be all programmable through MIDI however it's not going to be occupied by any of the five loops that's just going to be reserved for the distortion and overdrive and fuzz type things and then these are going to be reserved for the MIDI control so that we can combine programs where we have overdrive and distortion pedals switching in with whatever determined preset we have on the Big Sky Mobius and timeline and those are just going to be controlled via MIDI so the other quick note is all of the materials that we're using to build this board will all be linked down below I was able to pick up pretty much everything we needed on Amazon so if you're following along at home check out the links in the description box down below but what we're gonna get into first before anything goes down is we're gonna take the pedals and the backs off the pedals we're going to check to make sure that firstly all of the contacts are clean highly recommend using Deoxys d5 this will be linked in the description and so that you can get this for yourself and this is an absolutely mandatory piece that you should be cleaning your pedals with I'd say if you're gigging musician at least quarterly is just going through and spraying these Jack any of the inputs and outputs and then running a cable into it afterwards to make sure that the contact cleaner gets worked in and the difference between this and most other contact cleaners is it doesn't just clean the contact it also offers some protection on it long term so that it can kind of help circumvent any sort of dirt or grind that's just going to get into pedals no matter what you do we're also going to cover any of the battery clips for the pedals that have them because those battery leads inside there if these hit any of the internal components or any of the solder pads has a possibility to short out the whole pedal then it seems like your pedal isn't working and really it's just an issue of the battery clip so we just tape those up with electrical tape and it's a really simple cheap easy fix to do that so what's going to it the back is off and it's clear as day you can see we have a battery lead here this is one of the better ones where actually it's recessed beyond the plastic but even so in this you can still get into a tricky situation where you can have your pedals shorted out just tape that up so just none of the battery leads are exposed and those terminals are exposed and that's really all you need I'm just gonna give a real quick spray in each of these and then from there you can just take any one of your plugs you just want to work it through a few times you just wipe that off in it dries it in a couple of seconds all right so we've cleaned everything we're now going to go into the dual lock part and we have two different types of dual lock and this will of course be linked in the description box what I like to use is I like to use two different densities and the reason why that is is that you actually get a better connection to the pebble board if you use two different densities in this context you can't remove it by hand you literally need to use a screwdriver or my favorite tool to remove stuff with dual lock is actually this car interior crowbar that's for upholstery and this is made by si our tools on the dual lock thing I actually feel like most people kind of overdo it and you know you don't risk anything by adding more do they needed but I think they liked on something in this this is with this much surface area like you mean like four square corners it's kind of enough one thing I should mention is I always even notice I go in a little bit from the edge and the reason why that is is that you'll be able to see the dual lock if it's not set in a little bit we'll start of look like you'll see sort of like kind of like the white adhesive from the bottom we're gonna start putting this together and start putting down the opposite under the dual lock and get this first rhode island so next we're gonna mount what we're calling the Strymon bridge stri ridge and this is made out of sheet metal and I'll provide the drawings for this to - Rhett so that if you will want to try to build one on your own or send it to your local sheet metal or metal fat place you can create a similar version of your own we're going to be mounting this dive directly to the top here and so what I'm gonna do is kind of get my position here where I need to have this I'm gonna market it with with this guy and this is just going to show me where my drill needs to go we're gonna go through the board we're actually on a hard mount these the base through the board [Music] alright so the Strymon bridge as we're calling it is mounted but we're not gonna actually mount the bridge yet because we need to finish the back row so right so we're gonna go back row now so we're going to start in the kind of the edge here with the one spots es12 so it's gonna go right in the corner here and then we're gonna kind of build out from there and although order is not critical for the boss es5 and this is one thing we should mention that's super cool about it compared to a lot of switches is you can arrange any of the hard wire loops in any position so for example if I wire this and loop one it could be loop one on one preset and then it could be loop five on another preset so I'm gonna go ahead and put that stuff down and then we'll get into our final row with the Strymon and then we'll start wiring power for spacing purposes I've put a little piece of that blue painters tape and this is kind of just masking for me where the edge of the pedals need to be in that way I can still put our tie-down mounts on the back here closest to the edge of the U channel and then have these kind of all up so that they're in the exact same place so we can get a really nice beautiful line there on the back but the other thing I need to do is I also need to make sure that spacing left to right is consistent so we're gonna use the right angle plugs that we're gonna be using in each of these and then make sure that we have a nice nice fit here okay so Mason's got the back row mounted ready to go with space for cabling so now we're putting together the Strymon bridge patent-pending you really don't need the surface area of the of the lift to be equal to the surface area of the Strymon because the reality is the only place where there's going to be any impact is on the foot switches so this is only three and a half inches deep so we're shaving off a little bit of that and that also gives us the clearance that we need to get to all the foot switches back here because when you have that piece of metal coming down you need a little bit of clearance whose foot switches to be able to clear you also have more space to access knobs which is a good thing if you do need to change a knob on the fly because it's sort of buried by this lip okay Strymon Bridge is complete next step is figuring out our power layout so all right so on the one spot pro the CS 12 we do have 12 outputs however two of them are 18 volts and one of them is nyvold AC so there's a couple of them that we can use so really what we're dealing with in reality is nine outputs and we have 11 pedals so that means a couple of these guys are gonna have to share and it's not a problem as long as first of all that the pedals don't have any disagreement amongst them in terms of their circuitry or polarity of the power so there's pedals in here I already know we'll have no problem sharing it so like Lightspeed and dynamic Distortion they will not have any problem sharing they're both analog pedals there's no clocking inside of them that could possibly bleed into each other anything like that so these guys are definitely going to share I'm pretty sure that the Echo Park and our vertex boost would be another group that would not have a problem sharing buzzes can get tricky I don't know a lot about this these particular fuzz is and the I don't know if they're using transistors or not that is something that we could research and kind of figure out but just off the top of my head my instinct tells me lights be dynamic Echo Park boost and vertex boost and I'm just taping these out and basically just numbering them so that I know which outputs going to correspond as I start to kind of route this so we're gonna go one is the roof Reaper I think I'm gonna go to as the as these two boost some of the right boosts c3 I think we're gonna do dynamic and light speed when you end up with is this nice pretty roadmap we have all of our numbers corresponding to each one of these outputs okay so day two we're back at it picking up where we left off yesterday which is starting to dress power cables today what we're gonna be doing is getting everything dressed into the power supply itself we're gonna be using their combination of Home Depot regular zip ties and these are just the thin short zip ties we're also going to be using three quarter inch tie-down mounts these are also going to be linked and these are really important that you get the right ones on this because the adhesives on a lot of these tie-down basis are terrible and don't really have hold up really well in humidity a lot of people that live on the East Coast like red this is gonna be a problem so you really want ones that have a really high quality adhesive so we're gonna link these in the description these are the ones to get the best ones they're a marine grade version of an adhesive tie-down we're gonna kind of start out at the start on one end and kind of work our way this way and that really helps just to make sure that you know that you have enough lead length to dress and we're actually just using the provided one spot 2.1 millimeter barrel molded ends and there's absolutely no problem with using these so we just take them and we just cut off one end and we solder it just the length we're gonna go now just kind of do a real kind of simple soldering power cable sort of thing I already have pre-cut the the cable here it's part this one is going to the es8 it's coming out of the SA and I've cut one end off just to kind of make sure that it fits perfectly into into this power cable here so I'm just going to take my strippers here I'm gonna peel the ground all the way back let's go ahead and tent just to kind of keep it together then red and I talked about the fatal flaw that everybody forgets to put the housing on these before you assemble so we'll put that on first because we don't want to forget that I'm gonna use the the octopus here this is a really cool piece that I bought on Amazon and I'm just using this as sort of the third arm here so hold everything down and you can start either way here I usually try to feed the ground through and that kind of gives me an idea of how much I can take off the the center here to kind of get it to go through and I probably don't even need this much lead at this point and probably take this still a little tiny bit off the end there I tend that guy might end a little bit here in the center okay centers soldered already pre-tin this if I just had a little bit of solder here to the bottom this should just eat it right up alright there we go let's give it a test though always good to test before you first summer power let's go first time we're pairing this guy looks like that's working and I always like to kind of give it a shake here just to kind of make sure that none of my power was you know my solder joints were bad I kind of like to really kind of give it a little bit of a workout good work out here too even though that's molded just make sure you're having issue all right maiden voyage do we have power oh wow okay so now it's probably good time to explain the thought process and philosophy behind how we have this board set up so these two pedals are what we are calling the wild card slot so I wanted to have two slots on the board that we're easily accessible to throw on something new that I wanted to try out or use for a video and I wanted them exposed so that they would be easy to take on and off and you'd be able to see them on video okay day three this is the final day of the build we are in the homestretch now so Mason is just finishing up all of the wiring the signal wiring for the pedals that are gonna be out of the loop so the three Strymon x' and the booth correct three stream ins that boost yep so we're gonna get this wrapped up we're gonna run into the studio room here and plug in a guitar just test everything that we have wired up so far all right here we go first test run sudo test run because we're not fully wired or partially wired [Music] nice we got everything pretty much wired up yeah we're gonna test it make sure we got all of our loops in order here's one [Music] all right so we're good on that I think we need to just we need to go back and do them anything okay so this is final assembly of the bridge yeah three days in the making here we had to make a couple of modifications drill this hole out a little bigger run MIDI cables through okay nice good things down there it is all its glory we started already preliminarily setting the MIDI control [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you killed this it's dead quiet okay so that's volume up on a guitar pedal board and amp no gate no nothing that's perfect ready yep three two one it's a wrap done okay I'm back home in Atlanta and man I could not be happier with the way things came out this week I mean just look at this pedal board it's far beyond anything I could have ever expected or imagined Mason just he killed it he really really did and about Mason I just have to say he is one of the most generous people I've ever had the pleasure of working with he was generous with his time with his resources with his knowledge he was willing to share anything I asked of him I mean he really is a solid stand-up dude and I consider myself really lucky to call him a friend if you are interested in some of the more technical aspects I made a few videos that will be going up on the vertex YouTube channel specifically on how to solder your own patch cables for your own pedal board build how we modified the volume pedal to make a really cool pedal board interface and how Mason made my custom three into one MIDI cable that was really really impressive to see him do and I shot the whole thing so that is going to live over on the vertex YouTube channel so everyone go show them some love the link to their channel will be in the description box down below where those videos will be living so if you're interested in getting into building a pedal board like this one or just learning some tricks of the trade Maison Margiela is the guy to learn from so be sure to check out the vertex channel below and let me know in the comments section what you guys think about the board I love I could not be any happier with it so be sure to give me your thoughts in the comments section below you're gonna be seeing a lot of this pedalboard in the coming months and years here on the channel so until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 553,181

Keywords: Vertex Effects, Dream pedalboard build, pedalboard build 2018, pedalboard setup, pedalboard build, pedalboard demo, pedalboard rundown, pedalboard 2018, pedalboard walkthrough, rhett shull pedalboard, rhett shull, rhett shull delay, rhett shull reverb, vertex pedals, vertex pedalboard, custom pedalboard, custom pedalboard build, custom pedalboard plans, custom pedalboard ideas, custom guitar pedalboard, pedalboard 2018 worship, pedalboard build that pedal show

Id: tKDRhMdjZQ8

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 14 2018