Get the MOST From Your PEDAL-TRAIN!

on today's episode of the rig doctor we're gonna be working with guitarist Kerry marshal Kerry's played with everybody from Tori Kelly to Kirk Franklin to Jason Derulo and lettuce seed just to name a few we're gonna be working with him today to maximize his pedal train pedal board for tone and for maximum space today I want to get a my tour it together I've been having some issues with some of my boards when I'm playing on the road to the point I have done unplug and go straight direct to the anthem which is a huge problem we're gonna be using a piece of laminated plywood to go on the top of the pedal train pedal board this is just a maximize our routing space in places where we can place pedals other than what would normally be available we need to get this finish for Kerry and one day as he's leaving for tour tomorrow with Keanu a day so let's see we can make this happen 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 so today I want to like get a might or leg together so what I've been having some issues with some of my boards when I'm playing on the road to the point I have thought unplug and go straight direct to the amp and which is a huge problem so I can't use on my pedals effectively so I want something that's more condensed that I know that it's set up there exactly the right way that I wanted to be so when I'm playing it feels the way that I need to feel and I don't have the second-guess of my equipment it's not working properly as we can see here we have a pedal train but we kind of have a way that I like to optimize the pedal train so it's almost like not only are we helping you carry today figuring out the you know how to optimize this thing and get it reliable but it's also kind of making the most out of a pedal train board which tons of people have and you know people use effectively but I think that what we're going to do it is actually going to improve upon the surface area that's already there yes so we literally just have this the surface here from get off my case and this is just literally plywood that you know it's nice lightweight birch plywood that's been laminated and this is just going to go right on top of the existing pedal train so magic City is going okay so we're just going instead of the el capistan yeah okay this isn't delay or whatever okay cool this is a okay it's got compression in Drive okay yeah but it's mainly just really for the drive side I don't even use the compression that's what I think about the other one like the good person got it take this one off on anything yeah that one no okay I mean I think the first thing she that's the statement of everything off okay and then we can kind of read it and then kind of transfer stuff to this board you know size-wise kind of get the layout right then I'll remove the petals and they'll actually mount this from the bottom so from the top you want to see any screws that come up from the bottom so the first step here is really just cleaning the entire surface of the original pedal train once we remove all of those petals obviously we have the remnants of any velcro or any zip tie mounts we want to make sure that we get rid of all those that we take them off so there's this flat of surface as possible in order to mount on the new surface that we got from get off my case the layout that you had stuff is that kind of the desirable place for everything or you haven't be if everything you know weren't perfect because all right so the thing with the volume pedal specifically because I play with my left foot yeah the cool thing about using something like this is that we're not restricted to certain placements in order to give the surface area of the pedal train got it you know so we can put stuff anywhere and you know stuff like your jacks being broken off on the back of these like we can in sit all this stuff so that there's no chance what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use some some painters tape here and I'm going to kind of use it to to tape off the edges because even even the reason why is just because I want to leave you know like you talked to that how some of your Jack's got broken off right and I just want to make sure that we don't have any any risk of that once it's all clean what I like to do is then mount all of the pedals on the new surface before I mount the surface to the pedal train this is just to make sure that all the spacing is exactly where I want it I use some painters tape to kind of map out the edges that way I didn't put any pedals too close to the edge Carrie did have some problems in the past where he got some of his cables kicked by roadies or people on stage and it damaged some of the jacks of his pedals so I want to make sure that I inset the pedals slightly from the edge so there's enough clearance where a cable is not going to get kicked on the jack itself so it just helps keep everything a little bit cleaner and a little bit less susceptible to having a problem down the line once I've done that then I'm going to mount it from the bottom of the pedal train through the actual pedal train platform of the pedal train you know there's skeleton for the entire thing a frame and I like to use self tapping metal screws to go through that that also easily goes through the wood I also drill pilot holes to hold actual wood screws so you'll see that there's absolutely some empty holes there that don't have anything in them that's visible that's because it has smaller wood screws that are feeding through and those are just going directly into the pedal train platform again I don't think you need maybe more than four to eight screws to really hold it in there securely but it's just a good idea to make sure that you do it to keep it as reliable as possible alright so in terms of pimping this pedal train we've got the top platform and mounted here it's a little bit messy because I've just drilled all the holes out that I'm going to need to bring in the power coming up from underneath the pedal board because a pedal train obviously we have a pedal pedal power supply underneath the pedal or drill all this out I'm gonna reapply all the pedals back in their original positions but I have all these nice neat holes drilled so they can bring in all of the power cables and keep it really really nice and neat and then we're going to do all the audio topside and really is coming together pretty quickly here today which is which is a good thing for those of you at home that are going to be doing this yourselves it's a really just easy way to optimize spacing after the surface is down I like to go to power first now I've routed two spaces in the actual surface so that I can bring the power up from the bottom because now that we're blocking the channels that were originally on the pedal train we have to drill some holes through so that we can bring the power up from the bottom but the trade-off is is that we have way more space to be able to route pedals we don't have any restriction whatsoever on where we put pedals we can use the entirety of the top of the surface so that is one big benefit to always add a platform on top of your existing pedal train and this is just a half inch piece of laminated plywood that has Formica on the top and a BS on the bottom so we have this EOCs power supply it uses RCA cables which is a little bit different than the norm however it is more reliable of a connection compared to a 2.1 or a 2.5 millimeter barrel connector like most power supplies are it's just a little less than standard and so you don't always have the same materials luckily I did have some RCA cables handy that were just the jacks or the RCA cables but we didn't end up mean to use them because I was able to cut all these to length one thing I should mention is you want to make sure that you measure the polarity on these because it's a little bit different than the way that you would solder a standard voodoo lab stop power cable the where you would normally put the shield and the hot are reversed on this in order to get the right polarity for the majority of pedals so you just want to make sure you have your multimeter handy so you understand which side is the center and which side is the shield so just a forewarning on that when you're soldering any of your power cables and we just brought everything in through two holes it was very easy everything reached and we just terminated each one of these to the exact length that it needed to be to reach the pedals after we finished power we're gonna immediately get into our audio cables now Carrie had some of these cables already made and for the most part they were all made very well they used high quality switch craft ends so we're gonna reuse as much as we can here and then we're just gonna add a couple of new ones just for things that maybe don't reach in this new format or with the new pedals and just make sure that we're able to save them as much money as possible by reusing cables again this is totally fine to do if you have a cable that you maybe made once before as long as you're thorough about removing in the old solder and kind of just giving it a nice new fresh connection there shouldn't be any reason why a connector that was previously used can't be reused again so we're gonna do that as much as we can and then we'll get into some testing so where we are at this point power has been wired we got the audio cables soldered up and we're just going to do a kind of a sound check here to kind of see where we are so let's let's give it a sound check so we're doing our initial sound check I haven't dressed the cables and with terms of zip ties I'm just making sure that all the runs are working we did find that we had an oscillation issue for whatever reason with the with the did area tuners so we've gone back to the original polytune and all kind of make room for that but we just wanted to make sure that we have a noise free and you nicely assembled rig here so we're just going to go in through I'm going to kind of beat up on the cables and just make sure we don't hear any intermittent stuff that all the jacks are clean and all that so Kerry is going to play [Music] [Music] no issues there I think that I think the thing to do now is you know the booster taking a hit on tour so we're going to take a look at that and I diagnose that get the polytune kind of in the right place here we'll be ready from there sweet [Music] we [Music] you [Music] you [Music] the biggest difference that I noticed is when I first brought this board in it was kind of like all over the place the two tones weren't the way that I anticipated hearing they tell us the reason why I got the pedals they weren't responding the same way so after Mason got together and really just went through meticulously making sure that all the cables were right ensuring that like the clinton is the overall cleanest for the port I'll worry about cables being all over the place breaking or the pedals not responding they're sounding the way that I wanted to sound I feel very comfortable going out and knowing that every night that I performed it is going to give me the kind of sound that I anticipated having so I'm super excited I'm thoroughly pleased because again this is how I make my life with it so if it doesn't sound all right then I'm not going to sound right so super excited so there you have it Kari did an amazing job of hanging in there with us all day he was here to watch the entire process unfold and sounded incredible he commented that it had a lot less noise it looked better it was more functional and that he could trust it most importantly on the upcoming gigs that he had because again even though he had been using it for a couple of months he was starting to have reliability problems even though it wasn't even six months old so I think we've solved that problem for him we definitely have improved the tone for him based on his accounts and I believe that we're gonna have something for him that's gonna be working for years and years to come pending that he doesn't change the rig which as guitar players were all guilty of doing of course this is a great example for you at home if you're considering updating your pedal train pedal board you can pimp your pedal train just like this I highly recommend that you put on a platform surface that you mount on top and again this is an old trick that I've seen done by guys like XTS over in Nashville that a very famously just updated existing pedal train boards by doing this it allows you to have the power supply underneath and then you can have your pedals on top and then bring in the power cables strategically by drilling portholes in strategic places in the actual surface and then you can just route all your audio cables on top makes for really easy troubleshooting if anything goes wrong so that you're not having to turn things on both sides like you ordinarily would on a pedal train and you have a lot more space to route cables to put extra pedals and all those cool things so one thing I highly recommend if you want to pimp your pedal train pedal board thank you so much to Carrie Marshall for working with us today and thank you for watching if you're interested in any of the products or things that we used in the video today please check the description it has the links for everything given to you almost everything on Amazon so it's someplace that almost everybody can get this product it's very accessible very easy to get and if it's a custom vendor I've listed who they are and you can just tell them that uncle Mason sent you and they will know exactly what to do and they will take care of you again I'm uncle Mason the rig doctor thank you for watching until next time adios [Music]

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 94,401

Keywords: pedalboard, pedaltrain, pedaltrain 2, The Rig Doctor, guitar effects, pedalboard diy, Kirk Franklin, upgraded pedaltrain, pro pedalboard, studio pedalboard, Magic City Delay, Jason Derulo Guitarist, Best Rig 2019, R&B Guitar, pedaltrain pt2, empress reverb, guitar tone, Vertex Ultraphonix, PRS Guitars, strymon, Vertex Effects, pedalboard tips, clean pedalboard, clean tone, line6 M9, pedalboard build, pedalboard building tips, pedalboard setup, vertex effects pedalboard

Id: CTb-pNvE0s0

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019