DIY: How to Wire Your Pedalboard featuring John Bohlinger

hi i'm john bollinger i'm going to show you how to put together your pedal board so you can optimize the tone of your pedals and the ease of use now believe it or not there's a lot more to building a pedal board and simply taking your pedals slapping some velcro on them sticking them to a pedal board and daisy chain them together so we're gonna go through a couple of the main the main issues that trip up a lot of people the first one being pedal order the second one is the cables you use to connect your pedals and the final bit is the power that gives your pedals their juice so let's start with pedal order there are approximately 10 different categories of pedals and the kind of music you play will dictate what sort of pedals you're drawn to if you're an indie rocker or an experimentalist you're going to be a bit more adventuresome players like that tend to use multiple fuzzes distortions multiple delays weird swirly things whatever if you're a blues rocker your pedal board is going to be a bit more stark you might go with a overdrive a boost and a wah or if you're a metal player you're probably going to have a noise gate in there a distortion pedal a wah and maybe some subtle chorusing the great thing is you can build whatever you want out of your pedal board to get those sounds that are in your head out that's what's so great about pedals so you probably have spent months or even years collecting the right pedals you want so let's talk about the order you're going to wire them in because believe it or not something as simple as putting one different pedal in front of the other can make the difference between loving your tone and hating it now a lot of players insist that their way is the way but there really is no right or wrong in fact you might find that by going against conventional wisdom you can unlock some sort of unique tone that really gets across what you want to express so bear that in mind but let's start with this order that most players have good luck with i'm gonna start with your tuner then noise gate and then a fuzz or low five bit crusher pedal a wah a compressor a pitch shifter and this could be anything from a simple octave box to a harmonizer an overdrive or boost a distortion a modulation pedal in this case we're using the chorus delay reverb tremolo a boost that can increase the overall volume going to your amp and finally a looper putting looper to the end allows you to loop uh the effects the affected signals so you want to loop something distorted or affected you can and build from there i encourage you to experiment with the order because you might find something works better with your particular pedals for instance jimi hendrix would run his fuzz after his law and although unconventional nobody is going to argue that that wasn't an epic tone so again just kind of play around the thing is there's no standardized pedals so they're going to react differently different manufacturers kind of work differently with different pedals so experiment take your time try it all see what works best if you're not happy with your tone then try something else now that you know your pedal order it's time to arrange them on your pedal board space is always going to be at a premium on a pedalboard and you want to make sure everything fits begin before you begin wiring so and not only do they have to fit but in addition that it has to be ergonomically easy to use for instance pedals that you use often that you're going to hit often or really work you need them kind of in the easiest place to reach for instance a wah pedal when you engage that it's not like you hit it once and leave it you're you're rocking it so i would always have that front also there's times when you want to hit two pedals at the same time for instance maybe your overdrive and your distortion you put those somewhere easy to reach in front where you can hit two pedals at the same time then you have the option of like a little bit of dirt a lot of dirt ton of dirt so it's a matter of kind of making it all work and you might have to get creative it's a little bit like a game of tetris you might have to turn something sideways or whatever to make it fit so here with the magic of time-lapse photography i'll show you our options here okay now that we've got our pedals in order i'm going to talk about something that is equally important but often overlooked and that's your cable in now it's tempting after spending all this time and money on buying the ultimate pedals to save a little bit of money by getting cheap cables or using whatever you have handy but the truth is a cheap cable can completely undermine the tone of your amazing rig so it's worth putting the time money and energy into finding the right cables now the main thing that we're talking about is it's not about buying uh cables made of like precious metals or anything like that what it comes down to is something called capacitance and not to get all scientific but essentially capacitance is a cable's ability to carry the entire signal and the rule of thumb is the lower the capacitance the more of the true signal you're going to hear cheap cables will have a high capacitance so they're going to make your signals lose treble sound muddy and dark ideally you're going to find a brand that has a low capacitance and is still in your budget and there's plenty of options we're going with this uh patch factory um because it has a low capacitance and we can cut the cables to length which brings me to the next point cable length is really important every the further your signal has to travel the more loss of signal you're going to have so ideally you're going to cut those cables as as short as possible that's why i like the option of making them to making them for your pellet board there are a lot of pre-made cables you know pre-made links they're great and if that works for you perfect but for this option we're going to cut them right two links so we're going to make them as short as possible another consideration is the run uh the cable running in and out you should kind of keep length in mind there as well if you need a lot of uh a long cable for whatever you're doing on stage well then of course use it but the least amount of cabling you can use the better off gonna be so what we're gonna do is we're going to once we have our pedal order we're going to cut cables to fit uh be to string them all together with as little cabling as possible so here goes i'm not going to have to you're not going to have to watch the whole thing but in short i'm going to measure cut and apply now a side note when you're arranging your pedals make sure you use some industrial strength velcro your pedals are going to take a beating on the road and you want to make sure that they stay in place because once they start moving that undermines your cabling and your power and everything else and try and velcro them once you know where they're going to live because the more times you pick it up and and put them down and remove them it kind of undermines the integrity of the of the velcro here's another great tip when you build your cables test each cable right after you build it because there's nothing worse than cutting all your cables wiring up your board and then not getting any tone then you have to go back and check every one okay you may have noticed that there were a few changes as we went but tweaking is part of the process because when you're when you're wiring it together you may think you know this is really better there i need a little bit more room here but that's part of the fun and a great thing about this pedal board too we've left some room for additions down the road so you can continue the tweakery as long as you want okay last step but certainly not the least we have to deal with power now at this point it might be tempting to just find a wall wart and daisy chain everything together and all the lights might actually come on but more than likely your pedals will not be optima optimized they're going to be kind of buzzy they're going to be noisy they may not sound right so it's worth it taking the time to find the right kind of power there's a lot of companies that make these power bricks they're specialized for paddle and ideally the very best ones have isolated jacks an isolated jack means that the jack provides enough power specifically for that output and it doesn't share with the other ones now that being the case you can take an isolated jack and run it to several different pedals if you need to but your best bet is running one per we have 14 pedals here so we had to go with something pretty big we went with the voodoo lab mondo which we mounted beforehand underneath the underneath the pedalboard that way it saved us all this real estate up top and the uh the pedal power is is screwed in with brackets so it's not going anywhere you really don't want your power moving because once that moves it undermines the integrity of the connection and you're going to have shorts and problems like that so it's going to take a bit of math find out what your power needs are and find a supplier that will cover all those needs now we're we're in luck right here because everything is 9 volt but that may not be the case for you if you use a lot of like digital pedals things like strymon or line 6 or tc electronics complicated digital pedals are less forgiving about power than say analog pedals in fact you might find on things like like overdrives or compression that they might sound better if you run it into a power supply that offers sag meaning it'll feel a little bit like a dying battery that works with analog doesn't work with digital so make sure you provide your pedals with accurate power so another thing to think about is when you're connecting them all again you want you kind of want to minimize you want a clean board we're going to run everything from underneath and run it individually to each one arranging each uh each cable in the right length so you don't have super long ones going to short places like that ideally they usually usually bricks give you different options so use the long ones when you need it use the short ones when you need it just minimize the length of your cables so again i'll show you as we wire it up okay once you have it all together just experiment a little bit and see how it sounds if it's not quite there try moving things around try changing cables whatever but keep in mind those three basic things we mentioned order cables and power and in the future if you have any do-it-yourself kind of suggestions let us know we'll give it a try you can leave it in the comments in the bottom of this video thanks very much this is john bolinger until next time don't forget to sign up for pg perks your all-access pass to exclusive gear giveaways and discounts on premiereguitar.com

Channel: Premier Guitar

Views: 575,058

Keywords: Do It Yourself (Hobby), How-to (Website Category), Guitar (Musical Instrument), Guitarist (Profession), Pedalboard, Guitar Effects, Effects Unit, Distortion, Delay, Wah, Wah Wah, Guitar Pedalboard, Fender, Gibson, pedalboard, rig, rig rundown, guitar gear, pedalboards, how to build a pedalboard, diy pedalboard, guitar pedals, gibson, fender, gibson guitar, john bohlinger, diy video, tutorial, how to, guitar 101, building a pedalboard, pedalboard design, pedalboard layout

Id: Rqm5Z06URUg

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2015