Designing His Dream Pedalboard

on this episode of the rig doctor we're gonna be working with session ace and touring great Eric walls Eric is played with everybody from Beyonce to Black Eyed Peas he's won some Grammys he's an extremely accomplished guitar player and he asked us if we could help him build his very first pro level rig he's put everything together himself although he's been in the industry for decades and this is the first time he's trusted anybody to make him a rig that's gonna really be reliable it's gonna last and it's gonna allow him program ability by using the boss es8 switcher as sort of the brain for this entire rig so we're really happy that Eric thought of us he's gonna be going on tour with Toni Braxton he's gonna start in Pittsburgh and so we need to get this rig done pronto we're gonna be starting this rig on a Tuesday and he needs it done by Thursday evening for a Friday morning gig this is gonna be a super time crunch so it's gonna be really interesting to see how this shakes out follow us to our showroom in North Hollywood and let's see how it goes my name is Mason Marin jela I build rigs for the industry's top professionals now I'm teaching guitarists how to build rigs like the pros with DIY tips easy mods in all the tricks of the trade I am the rig doctor howdy folks rig doctor here we're in the beautiful North Hollywood Hills look at those Hollywood Hills and you know you we lucked out it's a it's a smoggy day here in LA which is you know if you're here and it's not smoggy it's unusual so it feels like the right type of day to be here we're heading to Sierra Qualls he's gonna be giving us as petals so that we can start working on this rig we understand the pedal board however hasn't arrived yet which does put a wrench in the works but I think we're gonna be able to accomplish enough to kind of get us started so that it doesn't end up being a deficit we need to have this whole rig done by Friday today is Tuesday and so we have very little time when I say Friday I mean like he's flying out at dawn on Friday morning so we really have to have it done by Thursday evening for a flight up on Friday he's rehearsing right now at center staging with Toni Braxton I'm hoping we get a chance to meet Tony as well a teenage crush of mine just loved her music still love her music a lot of classics there and our good friend Dean parks played on unbreak my heart that nylon string opening so hoping we get a chance to meet her fingers are crossed let's see what happens with Eric feeling really good we're about to meet Toni Braxton it's gonna be legendary well basically on a gig like this I'm doing a lot of patch changes in the middle of the song so it's not necessarily a consistent tone throughout so I basically needed to have the capability of pushing one button and turning almost effects at one time and that's know that's really kind of just piecing together as you know so this one here is some that piece together but you know this is well overdue I mean you know the busier I'll get the more I need to be able to you know know that the gears working for our police [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so we're day one Eric just came he delivered his petals all this stuff was bought on Amazon so he just delivered a big Amazon box with all the cables the connector is the jacks all that stuff so we're gonna be building based on pretty much stuff that you can get available anywhere I'm going to link everything in the description if you're curious about stuff about used I've tried to label that so it's as clear as possible for you to go do this yourself now here's the tricky part Eric didn't receive the pedal board from the pedal board manufacturer it was due to arrive today but it hasn't so today is Tuesday we need to have this rig done by Friday so this does kind of put a wrench in things so what you're gonna see me do next is I'm going to clean all the pedals I'm gonna put velcro on all the pedals I'm gonna get everything sort of crept on the pedal end I'm gonna tape off all the battery leads if you're wondering why I'm doing that you should check out this video in the top corner and that's going to explain to you why I'm doing that it's really just about keeping everything from preventing a short internally especially if it's sedentary on a switcher but it is going to be traveled and moved around it's just an easy cheap way to guarantee that there's not going to be any short due to the battery clip hitting something internally I'm then going to move into doing audio cables because we need to have at least one side terminated for the switcher so I'm going to do all of the sides that are going into the pedals and then I'm gonna leave the sides go into the switcher just blunt cut that's one way that I can save some time because we can't put anything down the pedal board yet so let's do it so I'm starting by just getting everything clean getting the pedals dusted off using the tone brush and taking off all of the pre-existing velcro a lot of this stuff had kind of the traditional kind of padded and looped velcro that you would find on a pedal train and stuff like that this stuff is pretty easy to get off it just requires that you use the the back of the adhesive part of that velcro to kind of get off any of that residue I always recommend using 3m dual lock and again I'm gonna link my six tips for just good petal and pedalboard maintenance here that I did of John Schofield so be sure to take a look at that I'm essentially doing that very same thing that I did with John here where I'm just taking out all the old batteries and cleaning everything using contact cleaner I'm gonna link everything in the description below so that you can use the exact same things and the exact same process that I used here in this section of the video so you can kind of copy this is just good everyday pedalboard maintenance now I'm moving on to cable assembly and this is essentially because we didn't have the pedal board yet so I could only assemble on the side that the switcher was on I don't know where the pedals were all going to be placed exactly I didn't know how we were gonna route things because I couldn't put anything down so I was essentially just labeling and soldering together the ends that we're gonna go on the switcher and then just labeling them like send ones and to send threes and for return 1 return to return 3 return 4 etc and so I was just getting as much done as possible knowing that we were already strapped for time and this was gonna save us some time on the back end by doing it now that's essentially what I'm doing here is this heat shrink and everything labeling everything and making sure that we can have it as ready to go as possible once the pedal board actually arrives now I'm moving on to making the interface for the entire board this is totally passive and I'm actually going to be putting up a rig doctor short which is a short video showing exactly how I made it in her face just like this and this one's totally passive because we're using the buffers inside of the boss es8 which are actually pretty decent and the cool thing about using those instead of one in an actual interface is it's they're programmable so you can turn them on and off depending on the patch and that just makes it really easy to make sure that you're using buffers when you need them and then you turn them off when it doesn't sound like an it's an advantage depending on what your preset actually looks like now I will warn that doing it freehand and drilling like this is not the best way to do it if you have a drill press that's definitely preferable just to keep the lines straight to keep your holes uniform I even actually kind of injured myself a little bit here because I got a metal shard through my hand and so you can see that I taped up my hand kind of in the second half of bill this thing so just a warning to be careful on that so we're bordering on midnight still day one we take a look now at the pedalboard we don't have the pebble board yet we're hoping that it arrived to Eric I haven't heard from him but he said the bid at going until midnight on the rehearsal so maybe he's done rehearsing essentially what's been done is we've velcro to everything we've put dual lock of course I'm on the bottoms as our standard velcro I haven't run any power yet because I don't want to you know do anything until I have the pedal award itself I don't pay custom interface we haven't had time to go to the hardware store to get machine screws but so I haven't mounted these in but I've soldered everything internally so the interface is ready it's gonna go at the esa so really we're just kind of doing as much as we can based on what we have once the pedal board arrives and we get that tomorrow we'll be able to put all this stuff down route the power and we've already even done as you can see on the floor here half the cables are finished so we've done all the stuff that goes to the s8 we haven't wired anything into the corresponding pedals so I'll see you tomorrow morning and see where it goes so here we are day two we're starting off with the power and getting everything down on the pedal board Eric just dropped off the pebble board this morning so we haven't had much of the day to work on it but I'm gonna try to finish all the power and I'm gonna try to get everything put down get the riser drilled in and harden down into the board so let's see if we can do it it's about three o'clock now and I have until about midnight tonight and then tomorrow we're gonna meet up with Eric again this needs to be done before he flies out on Friday so we literally have just today and then tomorrow to get this thing finished we're definitely cutting a lot closer to the wire than I would normally like to do it but because the pedal board hadn't arrived until this afternoon we had minimal time to do it even Eric was in a rehearsal we had a hire an uber to bring it from his house to take the pedal board to us here in North Hollywood so it's been quite a trek trying to pull it quite a voyage so I forget this done for him and get it done just in time for the tour but it's it's been a nail-biter so what I'm doing now is getting right into the power cables and if you want to know about how I do power cables really specifically I suggest you look at this video here that I'm gonna link above and this is really just about best practices how I route things how I assemble the cables the parts that I use I'm also gonna link all that below so if you want any of the materials that you use whether it's plugs or connectors that's exactly what I use and I don't typically build power cables from scratch it's not like audio cables where there's gonna be a sonic difference or if you use different ones you're gonna get different sounds what I really recommend that you do is use the provided power cables that come with your power supply there are different types that are shielded versus having just two insulated conductors one assigned to the shield and one to the the center of the hot and those are not as good I think the Voodoo lav ones are the best and most well-made if you need to buy one and they do make them in longer lengths and one with a blunt cut end so you can just assemble your soldered connector to that blunt cut and since there's no connector that hairs with the mated side so that makes it really simple so as you can see here we have a power going to everything except the h9 which you see is missing there and that's just because Eric's got it on his rehearsal board right now he doesn't have a spare so we're going to swap that in there when we have it is in the back here we have a special cord going to the HX stomp and that's just because we don't have an extra 2.5 millimeter plug the rig doctor forgot some tools at home and that's sort of the risk we run when we do these remotely so I improvised and took the one that came with the provided power supply just cut it to length so this is working okay we've got it doubled on the Strymon Zuma so that it can get the amperage needed and then we've combined a few items here just so that we can have the appropriate power to everything but everything is looking good so far we'll test it more once we get the audio signal going to make sure to have any problems but our initial test is in isolation everything looks good so job well done finishing day to get everything put down let the riser mounted take a look underneath the hood here everything's nice and clean but our pedals everything is nice and put down so you even have a an old snip wire snipper in there so it looks like everything's going to work what do you think about this labeling sequence in here it's a lot baby big believer in labels don't label me hunter stop labeling me by my own person so this is the last day we didn't do a lot of time on the screen on the video side because we really were in such a time crunch we just need to get going and really test and retest cables make sure everything was sounding good everything was looking good we needed to have it available for Eric to take to Pittsburgh the next day so having it really reliable in double-checking everything was critically important we wanted to make sure we had stuff tested in real time so I had Gabriel and Mason Mejia sitting on the couch behind me at times and just playing through the rig as we would add in each petal into the actual switcher to make sure there wasn't any issues all the MIDI programming was working appropriately so that when Eric got through with his rehearsal he could come in we can immediately start getting in to creating his presets so he could hit the ground running when he got to Pittsburgh the next day so we're gonna see him here in just a minute we're all finished up and we're gonna see how he how he likes the rig this is gonna be the first time he's seen it since he delivered the pedals to us earlier in the week yes are you serious oh man this is amazing wow it's so clean while you outdone yourself great doctor Wow just a little talking about [Music] [Music] [Music] man I am so blown away this is the cleanest build ever I am thrilled and so excited like this is everything I've needed like in one place pressing one pedal to get to all of these of pre-programmed effects and it's like this is perfect man what more can I ask for thanks rig doctor as you can see it's almost midnight 11:58 on Thursday Eric literally just left it was a whirlwind of an experience a total chaotic day and you know we were able to get it done Eric was very gracious but man we got it just in time for this tour he's on his way to pick Pittsburgh right now he's gonna be playing with Toni Braxton there on Saturday so we wish him well and we were glad to do this for him thank you so much for watching if you like what you saw today please do all the things like subscribe leave a comment give us a follow and if you really like what we're doing please make sure that you hit the bell icon and that just sends you the latest updates of all the stuff that we're coming out with until next time I'm the big doctor uncle Mason adios [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 68,498

Keywords: eric walls, eric walls guitar, eric walls beyonce, erick walls guitarist, rig doctor, mason marangella, pedalboard setup, pedalboard build, pedalboard order, pedalboard power supply, pedalboard essentials, pedalboard 2019, pedalboard diy, pedalboard cable management, boss es-8 effects switching system, boss es-8 midi, boss es-8 pedalboard, toni braxton unbreak my heart, toni braxton guitar, jairus mozee, jubu smith, jubu smith on guitar, isaiah sharkey guitar, mogami

Id: QahzBHLSfS8

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019