How To Build a Pedalboard | Guitar Lesson

hi I'm Mitch Gallagher welcome to Sweetwater's guitars in gear and I'm John Carr and we're here today to talk to you about pedal boards [Music] now pedals are incredibly popular players right well of course hardly a player out there doesn't have at least one I mean you gotta have at least a tuner right oh my gosh yeah at least a tuner right and when you get past that you start to run into some issues when you're taking pedals out you're going to rehearsals you're going on stage or whatever I mean we've got a bunch of pedals here and if I was gonna set up on stage I'd be dragging these different pedals out setting them up I'd have to run cables between each one figure out how to get a battery into each one a power in each one they're gonna move around right yeah it's the biggest thing as I'm sliding around and then when you tear down it's absolute right you got to take it all apart or find some place to put them all here well it's solution to organizing these pedals and making them a lot easier to deal with as a pedal board so we've got a variety of different pedal boards here but they all really serve the same function and have a lot of commonalities so let's you know let's check them all out and let's build one right so the idea is we've got these surfaces and many of them have holes and I'm here which allow us to route cables but we put hook and loop fabric on these so we stick this right down we've got a strip here and you would stick that on to the pedal board stick the opposite side on to the pedal and then they clamp right down so for this example let's check out the mini bone from Gator which is this pedal right here this is an ideal board if you've got a small setup you know 3/4 pedals you've got a hook and loop already on the entire surface and so all you got to do is mount this to the pedal right so you just peel off the back side here rise this there's adhesive on the other side well let's go ahead and stick it onto a pedal and Cha this actually works so we've got a drive pedal here from mxr this is a ride Jim drive so I say that right I think that's rising rising right and so we look at the back of this and we can measure out the the amount of the hook and loop that we want somewhere around there I just happened to magically have a pair of scissors in my pocket it's true what a Boy Scout you are I know so we can cut this off here now we could put one strip on there we could do a strip across the top strip across the bottom a lot of times what I like to do is do to handle lengthwise strips like this yeah makes it really solid that way and go ahead and peel those off and stick them onto the pedal there then once we have the hook side of the hook and loop then at that point you'll this one off here press this on to the top of the pedal board and we're basically locked in place tada look at that man that's like that now we can add additional board this one already has the can loop on the back of it here we'll probably need a tuner at this point and maybe we want a booster as well sure so now at this point we can cable these together and the nice thing is once we have them hooked up they can stay hooked up because we're not taking them on and off the board right but of course we can change things around if we want to it's as easy as unplugging scenery so we've got some EBS cables here these are very low-profile cables and they allow you to get more pedals into the same amount of space why don't you go ahead and hook those up so basically we're hooking the output of the first pedal right to the input of the second pedal so at this point the other thing we need to worry about is powering the pedals now we could power them with batteries most of these will operate off of batteries alone not all of them will but there are a couple of drawbacks to that yeah right well one of them obviously is that it's harder to get the pedal on and off and you know and change the battery out especially a lot of them are screwed in on the bottom you know so you've got to unscrew them and it's not convenient especially when you're on the way to a gig right right but the other aspect of this is that most pedals have a switching jack on the input and when you plug into that it activates the battery so if you leave a cable plugged in you're going to be draining the battery as you're using it so the solution is to use an external power supply to power these pedals there are a number different options there you can use a block or a brick type power supply like the Stephen tied Power Max or you could use something like a one spot which basically daisy chains all the pedals together you plug one end into the wall and then we have multiple power outlets here that we can connect into our pedals now let's go ahead and power these pedals up sure there's the end there so now at this point when we connect the AC plug into the wall or the outlet we've got power feeding all of the pedals and we can arrange this you know you want to your cables to kind of lay down so if we turn these and actually maybe we'd route this one yeah so these land flaps and cables aren't sticking up you know so we can do a variety of things we can cable tie these together to make this a much neater presentation so that we aren't tripping on cables and we aren't accidentally pulling them loose all right that's the other thing is when you put your foot down to stomp on a pedal of course you don't want to grab a cable you don't want to stop just connect everything exactly right exactly right but at this point we basically created a small pedal board we've got a tuner we've got a booster we've got a drive and we've got a delay I'm going to cover you in a lot of situations works for me man and the nice thing about this you grab this one pedalboard grab the power supply comes with an included bag slide it in and you're ready to go so at this point we've created a basic pedal board that's gonna cover a lot of situations for us right it sure will but there are other options and especially if you want to go bigger than this alright a more cutting right okay great so we have here another pedal board from Gator let's swap that one up there sure now this board is set up a little differently it's an angled piece of metal underneath we have a clamp for mounting a power supply so for example this Eventide block would slide right under there and clamp down and we've got slots that allow us to route the cables through so we can do a very neat presentation of our pedals it also makes the whole thing a little bit more durable now we can start putting our pedals in line now when you're dealing with multiple pedals or more pedals than this certainly you're gonna have to talk about the order you put your pedals in now you're gonna be routing everything Mitch and I did another video where we took a really deep dive into that and explored pedal order so that's definitely worth checking out right but at this point let's say we're putting together a board and maybe we'll have a drive on there and we'll have the Eventide h9 to give us a wide variety of different effects we've got another drive this is a Strymon we'll go ahead and plug that into the power cable here we've got a freeze pedal from electro harmonix so we can lock in some different effects and the carbon copy will drop on here as well so we have a lot more flexibility for placing our pedals where we want them and to put them in the order that we want them right right and you know you can also notice too that they're getting a little farther apart and sometimes you've got side mount Jackson top mountain Jackson so you may have some differences definitely got a look at cable length figure out how all that works and you can stuff the excess down inside of the holes if you sure actually route them underneath if we're going from the input here Brad could route through the slot bring it up exactly get into the back here and then the cables totally tucked out of the way yeah so again it keeps things very neat very clean nice presentation indeed we've got another pedal board for you to check out this one comes from Emerson custom now they're well known for their pedals and the electronics that make for guitars - are now making pedal boards as well and this has some unique features first of all it has these nice wood end caps which is yeah it's a beautiful presentation it has super nice slots in the top for on your cables but you'll notice we have four large slots here on the front and on the sides there are modules that plug into these so we could put quarter inch jacks here we could put power supply connections here we could put AC connections here and be able to route our signal underneath the board keep all our cables hidden bring everything up through these slots in the top of the pedal board and again it makes for a very neat very versatile flexible yeah it sure does and they've got modules that basically fit in these slots exactly right right makes it very easy on so now we've talked about and showed you how to build a basic pedal board we've looked at a little bit about how you arrange your pedals and things let's take a look at three example boards the Don and I are built one is my live board and two are his studio boards and we'll show you how far you can take these concepts so Don this is my live pedal board it's a freedman as you know and it offers some unique kind of features that that really made it easy to pack this board to get a lot of stuff on here make it extremely powerful but still pretty compact yeah it's got a really small footprint that's one of the nice things about it you know the two-tier thing right and it makes several different sizes this is actually the smallest size so the way this board is set up is there are two levels there's a level here and then there's a lower level here in the front underneath this back part there's a power supply mounted there and on the end there are connections for going to the amplifier and for coming back from your guitar so you can plug into the end you don't have to actually plug into the pedals which makes it very convenient again the heart of the whole system is the switcher so the switcher allows me to turn the effects on and off it also sends MIDI to control the delay and the modulation pedal and it also changes channels and turns boost functions on and off on my amplifier at the same time so this kind of serves as the hub for the whole thing right yeah you got a lot of firepower in there man right right yeah so the signal comes in it's going through the wah pedal going through the compressor the tuner jumps off of actually this switch box here we've got the drives in here and then the volume pedal actually comes after the drive so I can have full drive would be able to control the volume goes out to the amplifier the effects loop comes back and goes to the modulation the delay and the reverb then goes back to the amplifier again so a pretty versatile setup I can get a lot of different sounds out of it but it doesn't take up a lot of space yeah exactly and and you know me man I love the volume pedal after the drives so you can control it like a master volume and you can still use the volume control and right R if you want to léna right exactly and the little mini wah I don't use a wall that much so this works just great for me to have that there for the occasional song when I want to step on it but this gives you an idea of the control you can have and the functionality you can have in a pretty small space with a pedal board like this so Don this is one of the boards that you use in the studio here at Sweetwater right yeah this is half of my studio set up so why do you use two boards well for a variety of reasons really the biggest thing for me was to have a lot of options immediately that I can just get right to without having to unhook stuff or unplug stuff or go oh wait a minute let me go grab this thing and come back because when you're in a session or recording session especially I mean you've got a client it's really important time is very valuable so you want to have everything your disposal right so we'll look at this board first then we'll look at the second board and this board is pretty dedicated to gain pedals it looks like right that's the other thing about why we did two boards this is like the front end board like if you're gonna plug this into the front end of your amplifier this would be the way to do it you start with a wah pedal and a compressor and then you've got all your flavors of Drive and then you're switching those in and out using your loops which are ever right right it's just one two three four or five right so you just turn them on and off again you're not on you're not on stage so you don't have to be able to instantly necessarily a step on things quite that fast exactly I'm not worried about presets I'm you know I'm dialing in per song per you know track per overdub right clean and this is a pedal train board which has rails and again it allows for very easy routing of cables underneath and to the power supply this might underneath right right same same thing I definitely did that and these are you know I've got a I've got a hodgepodge of like custom cut cables and a few that I found there's like oh that's the right length let's just use the ligature down this is a second half of your studio rig right the other side this is the back end board like I would put this in the effects loop of an amp and this is band this look good size board together it is it is it's pretty silly actually but again back to that whole concept of just having everything at my disposal just being able to reach down and grab it and disclaimer total disclaimer I would never use this live nightmare but you know what honestly just dragging it back and forth from the closet to the recording studio haven't had any problems with it right you know one more thing we definitely need to discuss is powering so when you get to something this size it's really important that you have the right power right all these pebbles require a different amount of current or milliamps to operate something like the polytune requires just a few milliamps the Strymon or the you know the larger pedals take a lot more power to operate you want to make sure your power supply supports that exactly I mean like the cord is I think it's 600 milliamps um I'm guessing but I know it's more you know so I've got an actual separate power supply for it right and the h9 also takes five power of their Mobius right where are some of the other analog pedals and things don't take as much this is something to be aware of so you're sure that the power supply you're using supports all those and as you get to a larger board like this as well we've found that an isolated power supply works better isolated means that each of the power outputs has its own ground basically right right means you don't get hums and buzzes sure and you've also got multiple voltages available as well some pedals are 18 some pedals or 12 you know I've seen it kind of all over the map so write that information is pretty readily available about your website's water website or in the manual for the pedal so you could take a look at those and then choose the power supply it's gonna work best for your rig one last thing if your pedal board is gonna stay in one place like Don's studio boards do a case isn't that important but when you start to get to a board that you're taking out to clubs or on tour or even to worship situations or you're bringing out of the house for rehearsals you gotta have some kind of case to put it and yeah some kind of bag or case definitely alright and I like to have a case that is lightweight but still gives good protection and holds everything in nice and solid now most of the board's we looked at today come with a case so it's really not an issue right right but yeah I'm with you I like the anything with a padded edge you know a padded top it's really nice so Don we have covered a lot of information about pedal boards but hopefully we've taken it from the basics to much more advanced stuff right right I think we have I think we've covered everything you know in terms of just the basic assembly how to put something together right now if you have questions on how to put a pedal board together choosing pedals how to make it all work contact your Sweetwater sales engineer visit Sweetwater comm or check us out at youtube we've got a lot of videos and a lot of articles on our instinct blog as well to cover those kinds of topics I'm Mitch Gallagher and I'm Don Carr and thank you for joining us for Sweetwater's guitars in gear be sure to tune in next time we'll have more guitars more amps more effects we'll be making lots of music you

Channel: Sweetwater

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Keywords: how to build a pedalboard, build your own pedal board, pedalboard build, pedalboard, pedal board, sweetwater, building a pedalboard, build a pedalboard, building a pedalboard for guitar, build pedalboard, guitar pedal board, pedal board effects, building pedalboard, guitar lessons, guitar pedalboard, diy pedalboard, how to build pedalboard, pedalboard setup, how to set up a pedalboard, how to make a pedal board, pedalboards, how to set up pedal board, setting up a pedalboard

Id: vLQUIQshFro

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2019