Don't Make These Pedalboard Mistakes!

well all right today we're going to talk about pedal boards and avoiding some mistakes that you might make when you're just kind of grabbing pedals off the shelf at your guitar store ordering them online and putting them on a pedal board with not a lot of knowledge or background about pedal order the types of pedals maybe you want to get for your different tones that you're looking for and maybe some essentials and again we're going to avoid some pitfalls and we're going to avoid some mistakes in this video i'll give you a whole bunch of knowledge about how to put a basic pedal board together for blues blues rock modern rock tones maybe you want to put a basic board together if you're playing in church i just grabbed a bunch of usable suspects from boss mxr and keeley put them on this d'addario pedal board with an mxr power brick we're going to talk about all this stuff but first let me play you some tones from this over a fun track then i'll go through each pedal and i'll give you the ins and outs and tell you a bunch of ways that you can avoid pitfalls and mistakes when putting a fun little pedal board together all right let's play some music so before we play and check out these pedals be sure to check out my website workingclassguitar.com where there's hundreds of guitar lessons loads of courses tabs tracks pdfs we do monthly zoom calls with all of our subscribers it's a lot of fun the link will get you 14 days free and it's just a small subscription from month to month after that all right let's hear these pedals play some guitar let's do it [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right so we got some good tones there over that track just with these pedals and the rig that i have set up here we'll talk a little bit about that but really the purpose of this video is to get you guys to avoid some pedalboard pitfalls maybe i should have called it that um we're going to bust some myths and i'm going to teach you how to not make mistakes when you're just getting you know pedals off the internet or from a store and then putting them on a board with little or no guidance okay so that's what i'm here for today in this video we're talking about a few things to consider um we're going to talk about signal path signal chain and let's just get started with that by talking about the fact this is just a fender american pro 2 strap going into this array of pedals it goes to a fender blues junior that's behind me and i'm not using microphones here i'm using the universal audio aux box that's a wonderful tool for tube amplifiers so that i can use it silently and record direct i'm still hearing the tube amplifier sound that is harnessing the oxbox is harnessing that tone and sending it to my computer recording system okay so the oxbox is like the second most expensive thing in this video i tried purposefully to get some pedals that were like 150 bucks and under the pedal board is a d'addario collapsible pedal board and then we'll even talk about power as well because that's another really really important piece to the pedal board situation okay so let's just hear the strap going through the pedals there's actually no pedals on at this point rate to the blues junior with its internal reverb [Music] and i have it set up really clean because we're going to add drive from the pedals let's talk about the first pedal in the chain and i want you to think about signal flow like water okay so water comes out of the guitar signal comes out of the guitar hits the first pedal in the line and that's the mxr sugar drive now this is the pedal that they've designed to kind of mimic that the holy grail clone type sound okay when i turn it on i'm using it as more of a clean boost because i like having a clean boost in the chain and that's going to help further adjust these pedals or do things further to these pedals as well you'll see what i mean the cool thing about this pedal is you see there's a little blue light here and that means that the buffer is on so a buffer is a really important thing to have in a pedal board too because it makes the signal strong throughout the entire chain and you can turn that on or off i opted to keep it on here because i like the way buffers sound like this uh in the in the chain and i wanted you to have a nice idea of it so um i'm not going to turn it on or off but it would probably just weaken the signal a little bit if i turned it off maybe take some of the highs and the high fineness away you want to add that with the buffer now the sugar drive being that it is like a clone cone clone means that it's going to add a really nice mid-range you overdrive if you want it but if you turn the drive all the way off and play with the volume and tone it can now be a cool clean boost so here you go here's just clean [Music] it will boost it [Music] [Applause] what that's getting me is really nice amp breakup [Applause] [Music] and i really dig that because it could even be a great rhythm sound [Music] [Applause] [Music] now if i want to add the gain let me back the volume down a smidge and i'll add the drive a bit but it's really not my flavor for drive [Music] what that circuit tends to do is sort of make the tone nosey browner and it's not my favorite in the beginning of the chain i might want to put this later and hit that gain up a little bit because it'll add a new sort of mid-rangey component to my overdrive that i'm already using okay because you want to think of petals almost like ingredients in things you know maybe you want to finish with a little salt or you want to add salt in the beginning or do it both you see where i'm going with that but i like to use this as a nice clean drive a clean boost because you can hear the difference maybe i'm playing um you play a better chord [Music] it busted the amp up a little bit made it kind of speak more and that's what i like out of a pedal like that [Music] [Applause] now could you get that same effect from just a clean boost yeah you sure could but what's cool about that is some folks like that more sort of mid-range drive sound that it offers you but true to the true to form when you take the drive all the way down it pulls it out of the circuit and you're just dealing with a clean boost you can take a clean boost like that crank it up [Music] and drive the amp even harder the volumes all the way up [Music] and that kind of becomes an overdrive pedal because you might want the volume or the the tone of the ant being pushed that pedal can do it so i opted just to kind of keep it slightly overdriven [Music] what's cool is when you back off [Music] it's got that little bit of grit to it [Applause] nice and dynamic it's a nice option i thought that's a that's a one that's a pedal that a lot of folks could get a lot of use out of and i'll consult my my list here uh sugar drive 119 119 bucks for that pedal now we'll move over to a boss blues driver and what you're seeing is i have this first the blues driver second now there's a lot of options with a blues driver but what i've opted for if i turn it on [Applause] it kind of sounds like the amp with the sugar drive on right and i did that on purpose because when i have overdrive pedals in the mix i want them to just sort of start to slowly gain stage gain on top of gain on top of gain that's what i like so i'd be more than content with that [Music] [Music] and when i turn it on and off it doesn't color the sound too much not a lot of mid-range [Applause] [Music] just gain and that's why i opted to put it next because i want to start staging my gain up and my gain is my distortion okay just like basically pedals are doing if you had a little person over there that could just kind of you know uh take the volume knob and turn it up ever so slightly as you needed it that's what overdrive pedals help us do okay so why is it important to have it there because i'm going to start to add more gain from the super overdrive and maybe i want to hit it with the sugar drive so i'm going to turn all of them off [Applause] sugar drive [Applause] bright snappy hits the amp hard add this [Music] so they're all levels of each other [Music] and it responds very similar to what an amp would do if you turned it up sugar drive off sugar drive on [Music] not crazily altering the tone that's so so important okay so great little combination there and there's plenty of gain on tap in the blues driver if you wanted it [Applause] starts to get a little fuzzy [Music] but i kind of like where i had it [Music] [Applause] great great pedal i'm i'm a new believer in the boss bd2 blues driver okay let's check out some other pedals and add even more gain so that we can have a really nice gain stage lead sound alright so let's listen to the classic sd1 this is the boss super overdrive this pedal goes way back sounds really good with amps that are already distorted but i wanted to add this to the chain just so you could hear how some pedals tonally can really really change what you're working with so pedal off real quick [Music] pedal on [Music] [Applause] definite bump in the mid-range and that can be a good thing because mid-range can help you jump out from the band in a mix especially if you're playing with another guitar player that guitar player's got an overdriven sound you have an overdriven sound it's going to get kind of washy but if you have a pedal that jumps out with the mids then you can really sort of stand out when you're playing a solo i always make sure i have something like that on my board [Music] and i have it set up with a low amount of gain this is another thing with overdrive pedals i'm big on using a lot of level and a minimal amount of gain to really see what they what they have [Music] because i wanted to react with an amp where it doesn't sound squashed and squeezed as soon as i plug turn it on now if i went the opposite way you'll hear it gets rather compressed [Music] [Applause] not bad it holds together pretty well but i like to do that low gain higher volume i feel like it makes the the pedal and the amp and everything speak a little bit but there's another reason why i do that because i start stacking things i might be playing a tune or i have a nice sort of rhythm thing with the sugar drive [Music] throw the blues driver on [Music] [Applause] now we're going to go to a bridge and i want to crank it for some great lead overdrive [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so my gain staging was such that i had low levels or medium levels of drive and i added them together i got a nice sort of step through right so in my particular song started with some light gain added some heavier gain and then maxed it out there to wherever all three of them were on maybe i took the sugar drive off so i can get it [Music] [Music] this was not uncommon players like stevie ray vaughan would sometimes use two tube screamers uh people will stack overdrives altogether all the time i do it frequently as well because it's sometimes just too challenging to turn one on and turn one off and it can juxtapose a little bit too much so i try to find drives that play nicely together so i can do that and when you're playing blues or blues rock one of the cool things that you can do to add some space to add some movement is to add a tremolo pedal all right so let's talk about a tremolo pedal [Music] [Music] so tremolo is one of my favorite effects and i use bosch tremolos quite a bit i have it on another board here definitely my favorite to go to i love boss pedals because they're big footprint easy to hit easy to jump on and a couple things you should know about tremolo pedals in general first of all if you're playing blues and blues rock it's the perfect thing to add especially if you're a second guitar player and maybe they're playing some blues or maybe they're playing a slow ballad and the band's doing that you can play [Music] and you can create some nice motion with tremolo [Music] it's also great when you're doing sort of that like old magic sam [Music] i could do that all day so fun so when you're dealing with rate you're dealing with speed and that's how fast the tremolo is oscillating [Music] you've probably heard that song by the first to use tremolo depth is gonna be sort of the amount of tremolo or that you'll hear all the way down you're going to hear very little and as you turn it up it'll get choppier and then we can change the waveform here different sounds you'll see [Music] to the left it's going to be more subtle a little more fendery and as you turn it up that wave is going to get choppier [Music] [Laughter] so you can get some pretty drastic tremolo effects [Music] [Laughter] good stuff right lots of stuff that you can do with the tremolo pedal i like to kind of set it somewhere like this and play around with the rate now there's pedals out there that'll give you a tap function uh so you can tap the speed in oftentimes the tremolo i have i'll just put a little uh it's like a little helicopter blade that you can grab with your foot and turn that turn that rate knob up and down that's really helpful so this is what's considered a modulation effect and a modulation effect you can go in either place you can put modulation before your overdrives or after so let's talk about why you want to do that so i want my tremolo to be affected by my overdrives so that means if i'm playing an overdriven sound with the blues driver and the sugar drive that's all being fed signal chain fed one goes through another to the tremolo [Music] [Applause] [Music] if i had the tremolo before those this is why order is important i'd have all that sound going into my overdrive and affecting that it might be cool right but for most of the things i think you're going to want to play on an average rock and blue situation you're probably going to want your tremolo after your overdrives okay but again no rules but you don't want the whoop sound going in and affecting the input gain of the overdrive okay try to think of some fancy analogy but it's too quick for me to think about what what a good uh a good analogy of that would be but just think about you don't want your overdrive to be choppy thus don't put your tremolo in front of your overdrive okay cool so we got a couple more things to check out time-based effect in their in the order of those that's super important now one of the coolest things you can do to fatten up your tone is add delay and really a slap back delay is my favorite thing to do this jimmy page to robin ford are people that i've always looked at be to as they're the single guitar player in a band but that slap echo can make your rhythm playing that much fuller in your guitar sound that much fatter so maybe you're playing something like [Music] if i took that delay off we're hearing the reverb from the amp but with this added [Music] so i want to take the reverb off just so we can really tell [Music] when i create a slapback sound i'm using the mxr carbon copy mini for this it's a great pedal and when i turn the pedal on you'll see there's the delay there's the mix and there's the regeneration off off often called feedback okay the delay is the time and that means the time from which i play to the time the which the the delayed note is played back to me so if i wanted a long repeat the higher the knob the longer the setting if i turn it down happens fast and what i like to do is kind of give myself a lot to practice and it's like okay i can hear that now my mix i'm going to pull it back to taste a little bit and i really want to make sure for a slap echo i only use one repeat because you don't want this that's multiple repeats now if i wanted a long sort of soloing delay i might do something and add a couple more repeats [Music] but we're talking just blues rock let's just keep it simple and let's turn the delay time down you know the rockabilly players use a lotus that's a good measure so we can kind of adjust our time [Music] too long bring it back let's find a sweet spot because you want it to sound percussive and rhythmic there we go let's turn the mix up even more a little overdrive so now we have that gallop kind of thing happening now again this is a time-based effect because it's delay and i'm putting it later in the chain after my modulation which is called tremolo because i want my overdrive to hit the delay i want my delayed sounds to be of the overdrive now some people will actually put delays before overdrives to kind of dirty up the delay it's kind of like adding one ingredient before or after i want this delay to capture everything that's happening before so that everything is delayed okay so i don't have delay then overdrive or trim okay so even if i had tremolo and i had and i had a long delay i could try that you'd hear long tremolo [Music] there's tremolo in there somewhere [Music] so the tremolo is kind of winding down but it's in the delay trails because i added that to the mixture so let's go back to the slap echo hopefully that makes sense see if we can get it make it a little longer almost now we're going to dial the mix back great tool to fatten up your tone now it got drier because we turned the reverb on the amp off and i did that because i added this keely omni reverb this is a cool pedal because it's got three different sounds here and i have it on the spring and it does a pretty good spring spring reverbs are a tank that lives in an amplifier and the sound of them often is what's referred to as the drip so you'll hear like and you can change the length of that and the amount [Music] that's probably a lot right so we're saying you might be saying yourself why have reverb on my amp i don't need this well you might not but you might want an extra flavor of reverb and that's totally common these days [Music] [Music] so we have the sugar drive the mxr and the reverb happening great delay great sort of rhythm sound [Music] [Applause] makes the guitar sound like it's in a room we turn that stuff off [Music] this gives it way more personality okay again inexpensive versions of these great sounding pedals the the carbon copy minis 149 delay pedals are also always usually a little more expensive there's a little more tech involved in making those that omni reverb is 129 okay so you get three reverbs and let's talk about reverb really quickly um we have the room sound up here the room's going to sound more like if you're in a studio or reflections from the room that you're in [Music] hear that against the spring [Music] the room's a little shorter in its decay time now when you go to haul maybe you're playing in a church situation or something with some ambient music [Music] and you need some longer trailing delays you could use that in addition to the reverb on the am [Music] turn that down a little bit maybe add some overdrive [Music] again turn it off loses some of the personality okay so good stuff there and that's why you might want to consider having your reverb last so drives modulation delay then verb because reverb is catching everything that you put in front of it okay so pedal order super super important i hope some of that makes sense to you because that's going to be the biggest hurdle that you encounter for sure okay another two quick things i want to talk about because you want to really go into battle with your pedal board having the right things to make them sound the best and that's what's coming up next so one of the least sexy things to talk about when you're building a pedalboard is power but it's so so important now thankfully there's lots of really great sort of solutions for powering multiple pedals different pedals like overdrive pedals for instance and even this tremolo require what's called uh they'll require milliamps okay now i'm not an electrical engineer but i know that lower milliamps is generally what these kinds of pedals draw and you'll see that you'll be able to power them in multiple multiple different ways with some very expensive power supplies out there but it's worth it to spend the money on something decent that's why again try to keep it in more of the budget realm that'll use the mxr dc brick and that's just to the right of the reverb down there and that's going to power eight pedals i believe one two three four five six seven yeah maybe even more um i believe it's eight so we got six here one two three four five six and i love the fact that i can get a nice power supply that's gonna supply clean power and have a relatively that's just some amp hum really really quiet signal when i'm not turning my volume down that's really important and the cleaner the power the better everything kind of works it's so important nowadays i even get consulted by a company here in town called xts that make sure that i have the right power for my pedal so i'm not underpowering things there's plenty of stuff out there like the digital pedals some of them require a lot of power so you really want to make sure that you look into something like this mxr dc brick the voodoo lab stuff is great i love the true tone power supplies and the strymon zuma stuff out there is great as well even the company shocks that i think has a connection with eventide is really great as well so there's plenty of really high quality power options out there but the dc brick from mxr is what we're using because it comes in at just like i don't know 89 bucks right and i'll put links to all this stuff below so you can check it out and this pedal board is this d'addario collapsible pedal board it's a cool pedal board um and it's nice that you can make it the size you want i don't think it offers a lot of space under room underneath for your power supply which i like that's why i stuck the the power brick there on top if you're okay with that it could be a great solution i think that's like 89 bucks as well 99 bucks right um got to take your notes right i'm not going to pretend like i have all this stuff off the top of my head there's a lot to know power super important that's the second most important thing that you don't want to fall victim to is having inadequate power on your pedalboard all right so the third thing i want to talk to you about is a pitfall that we can fall into and that's thinking that we have to buy the expensive boutique pedals now i love all kinds of pedals you see i got great sounds with some inexpensive ones right off of the shelf and again i'll put links below you can check each and every one out but should you buy the the modded blues driver maybe you might want to check it out if it's that important to you you might want to check out the hand built overdrive pedal that's 300 or 400 bucks but if it's not going to serve you look into the you know 59 what is it 58.99 for a boss sd1 or a ds1 start there and you know these are inexpensive things to get into to see what you like or what you don't like now there's obviously thousands of videos of guys like me and gals playing these pedals that are doing a great job demoing them for you but i want to really make sure that you understand you don't need the most expensive ones to start with they're fun and when your ear and your hands understand the nuances of what some of those pedals might do great but i could play a gig with these happily be on a desert island with those pedals all day long i know how to set them up i understand the dynamics and the tweaking involved in them it's not very much spin some knobs hear what you like and you're good to go okay so i'll put links like i said to all these below because they're the most some of the more inexpensive ones out there rugged quality boston mxr and keeley they all make great stuff and if you have any questions throw them in the comments because i like hearing what you guys like in pedals so that i can check them out and i can recommend what i think might be good for you as well all right so those are some of my pedalboard myth busting ideas you know different ways to set them up different things to consider when you're building your signal chain and building your pedal board you don't want to fall into the traps and get too many pedals that you don't need get what you need get the right power so they sound great and you can use them for whatever gig you need all right that was a lot of fun i hope you guys got something out of it don't forget to hit the links below for these pedals subscribe to the channel because i would just love to keep building this channel with all you guys and talk about more fun stuff in the guitar realm hit the thumbs up button and of course check out the link below for my lesson website workingclassguitar.com i'll put links there below you can try the site free for 14 days it's just a small fee per month after that loads of lessons tracks tabs courses adding to it every week we do live zoom chats it's a lot of fun please check it out please check out everything i put below and if anything just hit the thumbs up button because i want to see you often and i want to see you here answering your questions all right i'm cory i'll see you guys on the next video take care

Channel: CoreyCongilio

Views: 270,745

Keywords: pedalboard mistakes, blues guitar, beginner blues guitar, beginner guitar lessons, stevie ray vaughan, bb king, eric clapton, joe bonamassa, albert king, albert collins, gary moore, fender, gibson, paul reed smith, PRS, John Mayer, Two Rock, pedalboard, blues pedalboard, boss pedals, keeley pedals, mxr pedals, dunlop pedals, church pedalboard

Id: MOGW9Bm4gcw

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022