Don't Fall for These 5 Pedalboard Myths!

hi i'm mason maringella aka the rig doctor and today we're going to talk about five pedalboard myths that need to be debunked there's a wealth of information on the internet and even right here on youtube and instagram and facebook but not everybody always knows what they're talking about it's very difficult to tell who's somebody who's actually a knowledgeable person in the field and who's just a regular guy that's just given input to you that doesn't really have any qualifications to do it for a lot of the information you see out there on the internet we might as well be taking our heart surgery advice from our auto mechanics they are people that are fundamentally not skilled in the particular knowledge of pedal boards and sometimes will get you into trouble so today we've scoured the internet to find the five most common pedalboard myths and debunk those for you so that you know fact from fiction and when you're building your next rig or you're making some adjustments to your rig you don't fall victim to some of these classical myths that we see that have proliferated across the industry myth number one solderless cables are just as good as soldered cables this is something if you've watched our channel at any length you've seen that we've talked about this multiple times but there's a lot of misinformation about the quality of soldered versus solderless now when we're talking about the cable itself there's really nothing wrong with solderless cable it's the connection and the fact that it's solderless which makes it a problem there's a few reasons why this is true firstly a solderless connection is not gas tight some of the people that make solderless cables do purport them to being gas tight and i don't see any evidence from that being true and i don't see those brands putting forward any evidence to validate that that's true they're not putting it in a salt water bath or doing anything to show that it actually is gas type but let's just give them the benefit of doubt that it were as soon as you start manipulating it and moving it it is no longer going to be a gas type connection it is not encapsulated in a solder bath which is keeping those wires as close to oxidation free as is possible and i understand that our connections inside the pedal are actually not gas tight typically or at least they don't remain gas tight over time when you're connecting a quarter inch jack into a quarter inch plug those are not soldered connections that are bringing the the cable and the pedal together those are relying on a mechanical fit to make sure they're having high quality contact but we want to make sure that we stack the deck as much in our favor as possible and in the places where we can solder the connection we do we want to eliminate solderless connections as much as possible for this reason you almost see zero of the brig building professional community using solderless cables they're all using solder because they know that this is a risk and that they know that people are going to be making their livings with these pedal boards for all the professionals out there and they don't want to risk giving them something that has any probability for failure again stacking the deck in your favor that doesn't mean that solderless cables can't sound good that doesn't mean that they may not work for you but if you're looking at the two side by side solderless versus soldered soldered will always come out on top in terms of reliability and if you like the way that your solderless cable sounds you can just solder them there's no consequence to doing that again there's nothing wrong with the cable itself is the connection that is the problem so that is debunking myth number one that solderless cables are equal to a soldered cable they most certainly are not that brings us to myth number two all buffers are created equally i can't tell you how many times i've seen people say well i just have a boss buffer up front so i don't need any other sort of buffer or i use a boss dd5 at the end of my signal chain so i don't need another buffer or i use a clone so i don't need another buffer well the reality is is that the differences between buffers are almost as different as it is between overdrives it would be just the same as saying well i don't need an overdrive because i already have a boss ds1 so i don't really need a clone not understanding those two overdrives are completely different from one another completely dissimilar one has much more gain one has a different eq structure from the other the claw obviously having more of a mid-range focus much less gain the ds1 being very scooped very high gain these things are completely dissimilar the way that buffers are made is very dissimilar some brands are using bjt some are discrete some are op-amp there's a lot of different varieties and qualities of buffers out there a lot of people don't realize even in some of these boss devices there's not just one buffer there's often multiple buffers inside of one unit you put a bunch of those in series and you might only have three boss pedals on there but it could be as many as nine buffers between them so these are all things to consider and another thing to consider is even though a pedal like a clone is a great pedal for an overdrive that doesn't mean that it's a great buffer and in fact it's not that great of a buffer it's using a tl072 ic chip not a particularly good ship for neutral sounding buffers not a particularly good chip for driving long lines i think that the specification rating from texas instruments is saying that it's only stable at about 1k on the output so these are all things that you really want to consider when you're thinking about a buffer and that just because you have one doesn't mean that it's a good one so the thing i always recommend is looking at the specifications and these can be cheated a little bit but generally one meg on the input impedance 100 ohm on the output impedance if you have fulfilled that spec you're most likely going to have a very high quality buffer and ideally you want to put one first is the very first thing that your guitar plugs into and last the very last thing that the pedalboard sees before going back to the amplifier that's making sure you're getting the highest quality buffering for your system and isolating all of the impedance changes on the pedalboard as much as possible from the guitar to the pedal board and the pedal board to the amp so again that is debunking myth number two that a buffer is not created equally that not all of them are the same and just because you have one does not mean that it's actually any good that brings us to myth number three that pedalboard power supplies if they say that they're isolated are all equally as good we've done a few things on the channel where we've talked about the differences between what's called a linear power supply and a switch mode power supply now you can have isolated versions of both of these types of power supplies one great example of a linear isolated power supply is the classic voodoolab pedal power 2. a good example of a now current and popular version of a switch mode power supply would be the strymon zuma or the true tone cs6 cs7 or cs12 or the chox dc7 or chox-8 these are all versions of switch mode power supplies now where these differ is that the linear power supplies use a toroidal transformer or an r core or a c core transformer and this produces a magnetic field often abbreviated as emf electromagnetic field now with a linear power supply even though it's isolated and it does provide high quality power to the pedals if you get the pedals too close to that isolated power supply you'll actually have a problem with noise because you'll be putting your audio signal in the electromagnetic field and sometimes when you get audio devices or your cabling too close to the actual field itself it can generate noise it can create some weird oscillations in the pedal it can create just a hum it's a steady state hum all the time that's always part of the rig that you can't get rid of unless you move the pedals outside of the field these are things that are really common and a lot of people that are using pedal boards where the power supply sits underneath the pedalboard and they have pedals directly on top of it they're often putting their devices right in the path of the magnetic field and creating an issue with noise that they can't really understand where it's coming from because no matter what they do on the pedal board so long as things are in that same position it's not going to change the hum or the amount of noise that's getting introduced into the system they have to move all the pedals away from that and this is why typically when you see on our rigs before building anything that uses a linear supply we're usually keeping it as far away from the pedals and isolating it in a corner on a flat board and try not to put anything on top of it that would be problematic or add noise into the signal path this is something that you want to consider and even though it's isolated it doesn't have the same issues that a switch mode power supply has with switch mode you can put the pedals anywhere it doesn't matter it has a different type of technology than using the toroidal transformer it doesn't have any noise consequence and the other benefit of using something like a switch mode power supply is you can use it anywhere in the world it automatically recalibrates the input voltage and make sure that all of your pedals are receiving the appropriate voltage on the output of the power supply itself additionally it's much more efficient so it can provide more current and more voltage on every single output and it can be made much smaller than the linear power supplies of old so i highly suggest if you are going to look for a new power supply that you look at a switch mode power supply and not a linear power supply which is kind of the older technology that kind of got us to where we are now but has now been superseded by the switch mode power supplies so that is debunking the myth that just because you have an isolated power supply means that it's going to be noise free or silent that is certainly not the case you have to be very careful if you are using a linear power supply on where you put it and keeping it away from any of your pedals so that you don't introduce any noise into the system that brings us to myth number four mixing your dc power cables and your audio cables is a no-no now that is actually a myth and it is completely false but i can see why a lot of us believe that we can't put our dc cables and our audio cables together in fact there are a lot of pedalboard rig builders that i see that are propagating this false information for the types of signals that we're running in the guitar world single-ended systems like this with dc low voltage low current and this is kind of thinking on a larger scale you know we feel like one amp is such a huge amount of current but in the scheme of things it's very low current that that means that we can't put our dc audio next to our power cables and some of these guys will say oh yeah it's going to make so much noise and you got to separate them and they create separate looms for them and they run them parallel to each other it's just blatantly false these are not things that are going to affect the noise now if this were ac that they were talking about ac lines then that would have some merit you would want to try to keep them as far away from each other as you could and if you were going to cross your asd lines with your audio you'd want to do it in a perpendicular fashion and not actually put them in parallel with each other you want to kind of keep them as far away from each other and again if they need to touch you do that in a perpendicular fashion so that they cross this way and they're not lining up side by side but in terms of actually adding noise to the system dc and any of your standard shielded guitar cables are going to be just fine being side by side that is not going to be a problem again in the guitar world this is also low current also low voltage that we are not going to have any issues whatsoever with running dc with audio you can put them right together bundle them in the same loom whatever is going to work best for the neatness and your strategy in terms of wiring your pedalboard it is not going to have any consequence whatsoever to put those together they do not need to be separated and if you ever see them separated on our rigs it's only because there are too many cables and we want to keep the organization as such where it's easy for us to identify power cables from audio cables in particular when we're doing any of our routing or troubleshooting we easily want to know where things are lining up and it's just easier for us to identify the differences between those two cables on a pedal board very quickly if we ever did need to troubleshoot so that is debunking that you can't run dc power and audio on the same loom or right next to each other there is no consequence whatsoever doing that again the only caveat is if you have ac power in that case you do want to keep it far away from your audio but in all other circumstances there's no benefit to you that brings us to myth number five which is 18 volts is better than 9 volts i remember when a company a couple of years back came out with a step up power supply connector that you could take a 9 volt connector to plug it into this little step up box and then it would have a pigtail on the other side that you could plug into your pedal itself to bring 9 volts up to 18 volts now people were doing this like crazy and we started to learn about it because we were getting tons of returns of one pedal in particular our vertex boost where people were running it at 18 volts because they thought that 18 volts was going to make it sound better they didn't realize that internally the pedal is already running at 18 volts and so by doubling the voltage they were doubling 18 volts and not going from 9 to 18. so they were overloading the circuit they were damaging the circuit and we had to replace a lot of zeners and diodes and a couple of resistors to get this thing back in order again and some people were confused because they had heard from this company that makes this little step up box that it was going to transform the tone and then everything was going to sound better at 18 volts well the reality is is that most of the pedals out there are designed with a specific voltage in mind and are not able to accept higher than 9 volts or 12 volts or whatever it is that's published in the specification of the pedal if it says 9 volts you should presume 9 volts if you don't check with the manufacturer to see if it can take higher i wouldn't use anything other than the voltage that's published on the pedal the reason for this is is that it will damage the product it may not damage it immediately or in some cases it will damage it immediately because the manufacturer like us basically puts a fuse in there like in our case with the zener and the vertex boost to basically shut everything down so that doesn't damage anything else in the circuit you really want to make sure that you check on that stuff and that you don't go crazy just putting 18 volts into everything that's out there because the reality is is that it will damage most of these products and secondly 18 volts doesn't necessarily sound better one example i can think of is on a lot of compressors they may take up to 18 volts to give them some more headroom but what you've done is you basically set the point at which the compressor starts to compress everything to double the voltage so it's going to have a much higher threshold before you start to get the compression effect happening so you have to actually intensify the controls in order to get the compression to trigger in the place that you wanted it to because you've just given it double the amount of headroom by going from 9 to 18 volts so really i like to think about the 18 volt thing as an ability to be able to increase your headroom to give you maybe a little bit more range if you need it but there's some cases where you just move the goal post of where you want it to be another 20 yards away from where you were and so you want to be careful that if you're getting the sound that you want at 9 volts certainly try 18 volts if the pedal will accept it and see what you like but typically 18 volts will add a little bit more noise and it will certainly increase the headroom of the device but that may not always be an advantage because sometimes you want that compression to trigger early or you want that distortion to trigger a little earlier not have quite as much headroom you want that extra saturation so it really depends on what you're wanting and i don't think that it's a cure-all to say well everything sounds better on 18 volts 18 volts sounds better than 9 certainly not true there's a lot of consequences if you don't do it properly and again always consult the manufacturer of your product so you make sure that you're not accidentally damaging your product by using the inappropriate voltage that the product is not designed for so that was the five top myths that we found proliferated across the internet and debunking those myths so you know the difference between fact and fiction now if you have a myth that you'd like us to unpack please do put that in the comments and we will straighten you out and let you know what's true and what's false and that'll also be for the good of the community so we just have more resources more commentary on these things that we're not sure about and to get those things kind of straightened out is a good thing for everybody so please do put any sort of myth that you have in the comments and we'll get to that right away and if you like what you saw in the video today we welcome you to like subscribe and again leave us a comment either a myth that you know about or a myth that maybe you were believing was true and how this might have debunked it or changed your point of view on that particular myth and if you want to support the channel there's a couple of different ways you can do that firstly you can head to therigdr.com we offer all the pedalboard supplies that we use on all of our rig builds from zip ties to tie-down mounts to our super lock which is our new and improved style dual lock type velcro we also have our pedal boards for sale on our vertex effects website vertexfx.com you can scroll through there check out our pedal boards check out our pedals if you want to buy one of those that greatly helps support what we're doing and we also have a patreon page where if you want one-on-one consulting about best practices about your rig we offer one-on-one facetime zoom and skype conversations also email consultations or even at the five dollar a month level you can engage with us on a weekly basis on our live stream that we have that's exclusive for patreon members and there's also some deals and benefits and perks even at the five dollar amount and if you can't afford any of those please do just send us an email and we have a free option which gives you the same privileges as the five dollar amount and we don't have any means testing that's required you just send us an email say that you want to be a part of the conversation on patreon and we will give you a free account at our own expense i hope you enjoyed what you saw today i hope we busted some myths for you we got you back on the straight and narrow so that you know exactly what to do as you're developing your rig as you're buying new pedals as you're thinking about how to improve your tone until next time i'm mason marangella the rig doctor see you later [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 95,535

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, pedalboard myths, pedal myths, guitar myths, buffers, guitar buffer, DIY Pedalboard, Isolated Power Supplies, pedalboard cable routing, pedalboard cable lines, Pedalboard Tips, How to build a pedalboard, 2021 pedalboard, klon centaur, little known pedalboard facts, Get better guitar tone, 9v to 18v adapter, powering pedals at 18v, debunking guitar myths, rug doctor, rig dr, the rig dr, pedal tips

Id: QEex3z-hcXg

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021