How To Build a Guitar Pedal Board

hey everyone I'm Rick Beato on today's video I'd like to talk about how to put together your pedal board now with things like the axe effects and the Kemper profiling amps one of the things that you still need to know how to do is how to chain effects pedals together especially with the axe effects because to create a patch from scratch you actually need to order your effects pedals you have to choose the amplifiers you get to choose the cabinets but you have to put your effects pedal in a particular order now there are not any hard and fast rules really that you have to follow but there are general guidelines that you should follow when I bought my first pedal which was this mxr flanger in 1978 that I still have and still works and sounds amazing that's the only thing I had to worry about because that's the only thing I could afford and I soon bought a distortion pedal after it and started on to where I have a hundred some-odd effects pedals or something like that and there's been a real renaissance of effects pedals over the last probably 15 years or so there's some really amazing boutique companies there's there's a lot of pedals that have been recreated and they've made them smaller so they can fit on pedal boards easier you know I have a fuzz face for example that's this big that actually only needs to be this big I actually have both of the different fuzz pedals but one of the things that I learned very early on was this pitch tone modulation time PT MT gate pitch tone modulation time that is generally what the order of your pedals should be okay let's talk about why if we're gonna talk about pitch if I'm using something like this this is an old-school digital whammy pedal that's the kind of thing I'm talking about that's gonna be your first effect in your signal chain after your tuner I'm not even counting the tuner the tuner is gonna go first but the digital whammy for example needs a very clean tone you don't want to put a distorted tone into it because it's not going to be able to reliably track the pitch of the Tarr okay so you want to put your pitch altering your pitch shift or whatever it may be first now pitch and modulation can be similar but I'm gonna explain what the differences tone comes next distortion overdrive pedals eq's anything that alters the tone like a wah wah will come next they can be in any order really but generally I like to put wah was early on for example because I want as much of the tone available to sweep with my wah wah as possible things like modulation like chorus or Flanders I'm gonna turn it on you're gonna hear that regeneration which I have all the way up here and it's giving you that sound I'm playing through a Marshall plexi check it out [Music] or if you're doing something like Peter Frampton using a phase 90 so after your tone comes your modulation that will be followed by time now time is usually delays first and then reverbs second you can also have a delay after your reverb if you'd like but typically you're you want your delay followed by your reverb and then the last thing to put on there is if you have something that is a looping pedal you want to take your entire sound and put a looper on it pedals like loopers will generally come last because you want to take your existing tone and loop that entire sound before you go into the amplifier you can put things into your effects loops many time effects for example people will put through their effects loop on their amp now in the old days effects loops didn't really start happening until the 80s amplifiers didn't come with effects loops I mean you could have them customized back then but typically if you're jimi hendrix eddie van halen anybody that used pedals early on use the pedals and then into the amplifier you can see jimi hendrix's effects sitting on the floor people didn't have pedal boards they just put them down on the floor plugged him in and went into their amplifier but they generally followed these exact rules here's a picture of Jimi Hendrix's pedals you notice he goes from his strat into his cable and then into his Fox wah pedal his Dallas arbiter fuzz face his unified with expression pedal and then into his marshall 100 watt super lead plexi so he starts with his wah-wah pedal because you want to take your full tone unaffected so that you have the full range of it so he goes into his wah then he goes to his fuzz okay so he can why the fuzz sound then he comes out of the fuzz and he goes into his modulation effect is unified that's taking that distorted sound and giving it its modulation and then right into his amp no this is a very simple pedal setup and you don't really need to have that complex of a pedal setup if you look at this next Hendriks picture you'll see that he's going into his box wah coming out of that going into his Octavia pedal Octavia Octavia and then into his fuzz face then into his univibe and then into his Marshall and here's how it sounds okay next I'm gonna actually build the pedalboard but I'm gonna need red self because red builds pedalboards all the time so I bought all the parts I've already got the pedals I got the board I'm gonna call red have him come over and help me put it together so let me get my call here yo what are you doing can you come over and help me build this pedal board now alright I'll see you in a few good bye we're not going swimming and we're making a video don't come down please what do you got to tell me I need a marker that's it alright see ya all right thanks Laila alright so the first thing I always like to do when I'm setting up a new pedal train is a mounted power supply so Buda lab supplies the brackets to mount directly to actually I had to buy the bracket separately oh really it was ten bucks I like to mount the power supply in the middle right as opposed to left or right because this way the power supply is sort of equidistant to every pedal on the board makes sense so what we're gonna do is just start off by drilling we're gonna just eyeball it here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so that's it we are mounted nice and flush there and you can see to the top you got a little bit of space that you can use route cables and everything the nice thing I like about the new pedal trains this is a novo 24 so this is one of the new designs the front has the opening all the way across and why is that good because with the old Pelle trains they just had two holes mounts that's right and so you had to pad to cut it right there and it was really only designed to fit a pedal power to plus with this design you can use a multitude of different power supplies I know that my brother has his pedal train or his food labs there and he has a Strymon here on the top and if you wanted to like if you needed to upgrade and had another power supply you could just move this one over and put another one got rid of it now we're gonna throw the velcro on the board loop side down I always trim off the end here because you can see from the factory it's a pretty rough cut so I like to have them nice and straight hopefully these are good sharp scissors do this just peel off a couple of inches so you're gonna line each right [Music] so I have a lot of pedals that I've collected over the last oh geez since the 70s honestly what are you thinking I thought the bat well I want a fuzz pedal on there I know I definitely want a fuzz pedal now I have fuzz pedals like this this old fuzz face and I have this new fuzz face and I don't think that they're exactly the same but this one takes up a lot less space even though I've actually never used it so I want to try this out so this definitely is going to go on the board I also have some custom fuzzies like this that are that are made from a friend of mine made this I'm gonna want to bring on some type of overdrive pedal maybe this is going to go on there or I have another term screamer this one that's been modded like an original and I brought put this one on here okay I'm gonna want to get some type of tuner oh right here the nice thing about the poly tune the full-size polytune like this one is it has an extra nine volt out so it takes a 9-volt slot on the boodle abs but you can power another pedal with it so you still have eight slots alright great so I've got probably tune that I got the fuzz so I'm not taking a very much room here with these three I'm gonna want to get some type of overdrive pedal another another overdrive pedal just for variety so I'm probably gonna go with something let's say maybe like the red dirt pedal by Healey which is a cool color if I need a compressor I'm gonna grab a compressor this is a Keeley compressor here I've got another one a bigger one here but this one I'm going to use because it's just a smaller version of that I also have my SL drive which is a great distortion pedal as well this exotic drive as far as delays I'm gonna probably let me just grab one delay for now this I'm gonna grab this mag echo this is a Keeley one as well I want my ditto pedal for looping this is the TC Electronics let's say I like my hog pedal because I like to do I like the hold feature on it where it'll hold chords and I can solo over it so I'm gonna take that and then whoops and then I'm gonna take my Cathedral reverb pedal for a reverb I'll take that and maybe I'll take this digital this boss old-school reverb rv5 I think that's a good this would be a good start anyways so now we have all the pedals affixed to the board here they're all good and tight and we need to figure out how to power them Rhett okay so the blue Labs comes with all of these different cables most of them are for your modern 9-volt Center negative power supply some of the older pedals like some older electro harmonix pedals and electro harmonix they have really specific power supplies that you don't want to mess with well so the thing you have to be careful with with these kind of pedals if you're new to this even just because the pedal sorry just because the cable might actually fit into the plug doesn't mean it's safe to use so for example a lot of these older electro harmonix pedals these would fit into but some of them were Center positive pins instead of Center negative pins meaning the polarity is reversed on them and so if you're not careful you can damage your pedals right fry them I've had happen fret solely with bands that we're working here that plugged in the pedals yeah they really didn't know what they were doing so you see be careful that's really easy if you don't know look it up online google it what's cool about the modern power supplies now if we laughs and Strymon and one spot all come with different cables for different applications so we're just going to use the standard 9-volt ones because there's no special need power supplies on that was one of the things that I decided when we were picking out these pedals is I didn't take anything to add its own cable for example my mxr flanger that I like to use it's a very noisy pedal but it has an incredible sound but I don't want to be dealing with that if I'm going to use that I'm gonna use it off to the side or just put it for the for when I need it yeah I think now we can go ahead and start running power cabling one thing to be really careful of when you're running power your signal cables and your power cables should never run parallel to each other if that happens you essentially create an antenna and that's where you start getting into problems like picking up radio frequencies and through your amp if your power cables and signal cables ever do need to cross you should always cross them a perpendicular innings yeah at a right angle so it cancels out any of that interference so the nice thing about the pebble train boards is you can run all of your power cables underneath the board and your signal cables on top so they never really cross but just so you know so you just plug in right here it's the front side of the power supply you've got eight outlets it doesn't matter with these cables which side you use they're both the same side and they're non directional interesting note about the vu labs pebble power 2 plus as these two outlets here have potentiometers on them and they're sad control so you can basically emulate like a dying 9-volt battery and a fuzz or something like that so we could reserve those two for your fuzz pedal and then the rest of them are just standard hundred milli yeah nine volt so there's kind of two ways to do this you could start at the pedals and then run back to the power supply or vice versa how do you do this I usually start power supply and go to the pedals one thing that I really like to do to keep because my boards travel a lot and they get toward an gig so I use little one inch by one inch anchor points that are just adhesive backed plastic zip tie anchors and I line the bottom of the board with zip tie anchors so I can basically lock all the cables down since the force is going to live here at the house it can be so whole to talk about board for data [Music] [Music] actually had to switch things around a bit because we needed to have things flow this way and then this way again otherwise you're in and outs will cross over each time which you don't want to have happen so we're gonna finish patching these [Music] [Music] [Music] so there you go that should work that's all for now please subscribe here to my everything music YouTube channel and don't forget to subscribe to rets channel up with the the link in the description thanks for watching next video we're gonna actually play through the board

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 527,191

Rating: 4.8915305 out of 5

Keywords: build your own pedal board, guitar pedal board, Rick Beato, Everything Music, guitar pedalboard, how to build a pedalboard, overdrive pedal, Fuzz Pedal, Delay Pedal, Reverb Pedal, voodoo labs pedal power 2 plus, Jimi Hendrix, eddie van halen, Unchained, Pedal Train Gear Review, pedals and effects, Effect Pedals, Vintage Effect Guitar Pedals, Pitch, Tone, modulation, time, reverb

Id: CRJK6rz6PPc

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018

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[u/thecrunge01]

Rick is awesome

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