Tips For Your First Pedalboard Build – That Pedal Show

[Applause] hello and welcome to that pedal show dan here mick here hello right ominous title to this video yes uh your first ever pedal board do you remember your first pedalboard i do i've annoyed very clearly i'm not sure there was an actual defining first one there was a first few attempts okay and some some false starts so yeah yeah no same here yeah so the idea with today's video we you know obviously all of our stuff is you know when you see the board in each week and you know we spend a lot of time making sure that you know everything's great and there's lots of pedals and things on there but lots of guys who have come to the channel recently are basically starting out or they've they've acquired their first bunch of pedals so the question is how do you actually go from having your first few pedals to actually having a pedal board yes that fateful moment when you stare down at the floor and you see a bunch of wires everywhere a few multi-coloured boxes and three patch cables that work and three that kind of sort of work yeah and you're taking a half hour to set those up yeah it's time to be a grown-up and or at least go back to being a child again and play with some toys and actually have a proper yeah pedalboard nice so um that time has arrived and you've decided it's time for your first board so the questions today are i've got it written down here when do i need a pedalboard an important question when do you need a pedalboard dan i think three loose pedals is okay i think anything more than that i think you need some organization yeah and you need it for various reasons which we'll come on to um what do i need to make a pedalboard you need well you need a board to start with and there's you know we have loads of options besides that's concerned you've got to be able to stick the pedal to the board you've got to be able to join those pedals together you're going to be able to power the pedals um you might need to carry it around you might need to carry it around so all the bits you need to actually come up with some functioning type of pedalboard and what are the advantages of having a pedalboard dan as opposed to a collection of mess on the floor well the first thing is your setup time is reduced by a factor of 10. yeah and even if you're not gigging that can mean set up time at home as well yeah definitely so you know if you need to practice any barrier to entry is anything that potentially stops you from playing the guitar there you go it needs to be eliminated yep and if you get some really cool sounds of your board and you make it easy and accessible you know you you're going to enjoy your playing time that much more yep so it'll save you some time that's that's the first advantage second advantage is it can actually protect your pedals a little bit yes because they're on a board they're in an environment where they're not clunking around in a bag maybe or you know just subject to the usual wear and tear of daily being chucked around you can often get a more consistent result with everything sort of you know neat and locked down on the board as opposed to unplugging things and plugging things in and wear and tear on patch leads etc etc yeah um might save you some money on batteries because you might move from batteries to a power supply that kind of thing yeah um the most important thing of all is we hope it's going to help you sound better yeah and that is the main advantage and it's the stepping stone into things that may come down the line yes but it may not depending on how you're but it's an important step it's a very important step when you go from just playing around with the pedals you get to a point and think right this is it now i need a board so today we're not going to include any fancy switches we're not going to include anything terribly complex we're literally going to take three or four pedals dan and i are going to go off now and we're going to put together what we would consider to be a starter pedalboard yeah what i consider to be a standard pedalboard um we will talk about budget along the way but of course everyone's budget is different so we're not going to do that you know it needs to be under 200 quid or anything like that but we will choose well you'll see what we're about to do because we're going to do it now okay first step knowing what pedals you've got to put on the board is going to inform you as to at least the size of the board that you need have you decided what you're going to have on your i have i've chosen i we were talking about when you need a pedalboard and we were both saying that more than three pedals makes kind of sense so i've chosen four pedals and i've chosen them very deliberately some old thing i've had lying around for years um which you know you've you've had it's been in the bottom of a bag this one's even got a knob missing happens to be quite a collectible pedal but anyway that's that's you that's your old pedal that you've got hanging around something new and exciting that you've got all gassy for and you've been on the internet you've watched that pedal show you've got like that yeah and you've gone on to the web and you bought something so i've got a delay pedal i've got another overdrive because i like to have two overdrives for me an ideal like the first pedal you ever buy if you use any overdrive sounds at all is an overdrive pedal yes if you're a clean person and you don't use overdrive sounds the first pedal you probably ever buy is a delay pedal right or maybe a reverb so i'm covering both grounds i've got two overdrives of different flavors yeah and then finally i've got something that i think is going to be useful and that's going to make me want to play which is a looper pedal so i can um do loops and play and i guess i don't know what you think dan but for me overdrive delay is where it starts and then you add something of flavor so you might add a modulation or you might add something that that kind of suits your personality or is not a universal kind of effect whereas i was i would consider that overdrive and delay are kind of universal yeah i think yeah i think certainly when i when we got my first board uh or you know first started playing around with pedals and delays seemed to be quite uh an extravagance yeah then you know same thing so no it's absolutely because the more that you interact with that the more you realize actually this this is a really important part of of my sound yeah so so so this figure delay that i've gone down the more i've been watching too much that pedal show route um i've gone for so i love my memory man um delay this is the memory man that's got tap tempo on and i've had this around for a while we're using this in a video tomorrow oh yeah it's a special guest coming out so i thought it'd be really cool to put this make sure it works make sure it works exactly um we had the gentleman um josh josh from from snaus electronics last nasa electric company who makes these great clones of the uh original blues breaker overdrive pedal well there's no coincidence that i have a bluetooth okay i exactly exactly and then the rattler this blew my mind when we had it on the show i used it at a gig the last week that we did and yeah phenomenal um and then i've got a little bit of movement i've actually chosen a tremolo yeah great because i wanted to also do a bit of placement thing another reason for the delay actually is because this has a different power requirement than the other standard thing and we'll talk about power in a second i'm also i've stepped down just included a tuner yeah the biggest question among under my choices will be where's your tuner and i'm sure their tuner is an essential pedal um yes or no you can pop because you've got headstock options and things like that as well but i've i've put that on there because when i get to five i've got a different relationship with the size yeah you know so what do i do do i start moving things around so i want you know okay so this is gonna so none of these pedals are very beginnery the trellicopter is inexpensive yep um the ditto is you know yeah relatively inexpensive that's relatively inexpensive yeah this you could call boutique this is vintage and collector yeah but you know your other two a christmas he was you know he had a few too many shandy's and he says oh i've got one of these kicking around in the boot somewhere exactly exactly so none of this we're not a beginner pedalboard doesn't have to be the cheapest possible pedalboard that's not that's not the point it's just when we get there so once you've chosen your pedals they've got to go on something a couple of important things though um when i remember when i first measured up my first pedalboard i got pedals i thought okay how much room do i need i did this measure it yeah yeah that's fine uh it's really important that you need to remember that there's going to be a distance between each pedal because you've got a patch lead and not only that if i have this pedal that close getting between the foot switches is a real issue so make sure when you measure up that you have enough distance between the pedals that is a gonna let you get your patch leads in there without uh you know trying to you know smash things together and b you have enough distance between the petals that you can comfortably get your feet in there and turn things on and off so boards boards uh i've gone for a pedal train for the simple reason that uh this particular pedotrain comes in a soft case and they also come in many different sizes yes we've got many pedal trains between us we do this one is a metro 20 i guess because it's 20 inches long that's metro 16 because it's 60 inches long i guess that's right so yep there's a hard case and a soft case option this size it gives me just enough room um to get everything on there but oh you might be struggling there dad well it's it's tight you know so i'm gonna have to go a bit of fiddly fiddly um to work this out i could if i wanted to you know i've got some room at the top but then i'm stepping over pedals um but for the moment i think you know i can make this size work yeah we'll come to that um there are so many different types of pedalboard available this is from older and ash pedalboards in the uk like a what you might call a boutique nice wooden pedal ball and they have a range of things in different sizes i don't know but you can probably order a bespoke one um i just couldn't point this out as well so this groove down the center here and the whole idea the same thing with the grooves in the in the pedal drains it's so that you've got uh routing options for your cables um instead of running the cables sort of uh between the pedals like this you can go directly underneath the cable uh but you know the pedals between each other uh it just makes things neater that's what those grooves we'll get to that when we start talking about wiring in a minute as we said there are many many many different types of pedal case until you get right up to crazy you know professional full-on highly expensive yeah things twin-tier multiple yeah you know catch phase on the inputs and outputs yeah all that stuff this is this is not for today but that's what you're aiming for yeah exactly that's that's the end game maybe or not really that kind of thing feels horror so that's um by a company called schmidt array yep and they cost many hundreds right and this is from a company called being here it costs many pounds this is a duck board uh it's you know one of those things you have to jump out of the shower on if you're on a serious serious budget you can go into being huge pay 10 pounds for one of these and you know a bit of black paint if you want it ikea shells ikea shells yeah in a similar vein i've actually made one out of bits of wood here's one i made earlier which was on a video from a couple of years ago but as you can see this is just strip wood soft strip wood from any you know b and q or any any of those kind of stores and it's it's constructed with rails so that what dan was saying is you can run cables in and out a front thing a back thing and i've made the back thing taller than the front thing so it's angled ever so slightly towards me lovely and then just screwed together with screws and that you know cost the cost of however many bits of wood that is not many um yeah so it comes down to identifying what you're using your pedalboard for if your band has suddenly got a tour and you're out supporting someone for a couple of months and you're going to be flying you're going to need something like you need something with a hard case something that you can you know that's going to be able to be thrown around a bit if this is something for you to go to a jam night you know once a month and just set up and play in your bedroom it's a very different proposition yeah i mean you can put that in a sports bag exactly you know you put a bit of foam around it in the back of your bag and chuck all the leads on top but as dan was saying the pedal trains come with either a soft case like this in the different sizes that's actually a diego a different brand which i've appropriated for this nice and these are great if you're doing if you're doing local gigs you're not flying anywhere these are fantastic you you know just pop you know once you've got everything else in the van you just put these on the top and you're golden yeah yeah the one one great benefit of soft bags is no one puts any cabinets on the top of them the minute's a flight case something goes on yeah of course nice so tell me about layout how are you going to lay these pedals out okay as far as the signal path is concerned my guitar is going to go into the tuner then that's going to go into the the rattler which is the higher gain pedal that then is going to go into the black box which is the lower gain pedal now the reason i do it this way around is that i can also use the black box for a solo boost for the the heavier game pedal to be fair i don't set it up um with the craziest amount of games it's it's it's you know it's a big thick sounding thing we have done videos on pedal order so if you're in any way confused about that they're worth watching it's also what they're saying if you if you're new to this the majority of the western world goes left to right right so when you read a book they just turn that way when you write you write across a page that way it kind of makes sense for things to go that way if you're right-handed et cetera et cetera however with signal chain it's the other way you go from right to left yep simply because on most pedals the input tends to be on that side and the output tends to be on that side it didn't always start like that the earliest pedals had the input on the left-hand side but the problem was with first place uh yeah the mutron the the problem was with the guitar if generally uh there's a lot more right-handed guitar players than left-handed and the output of the guitar is on the right-hand side and if the input of the pedal was on the left hand side your cable was actually crossing in front of you never thought about that yeah so and it's it's really uncomfortable so they ended up having the input on the right hand side so that you had a clear path to your pedals never never thought about that so the the um i guess the thing to remember is when we're talking about pedals first in the chain we mean those further to the right towards the beginning of the signal chain and when we talk about at the end of the signal chain we're talking about further to the left which is nearer your amp so the ones on if you look at the board from the top down the ones at that end are nearest your guitar and the shoulder nearest your amp i appreciate that that is very simplistic but when you're coming to build your first photo board you might not know that yeah now that's signal path however layout can be a little bit different for example i might say right i use my you know i use the jam the rattler and the delay and i always have those on together so even though my signal path this would be going first into that and then into the memory man what i would do is have say the tuner here and that would go out into the rattler out of the rattler into the black box out of the black box underneath and then into the memory man the reason being is that i might want it with one if i can get my foot across here with one press turn them on at the same time so there are little tricks like that that you can do even though you have shorter cable runs if you run everything in the proper order but you can do little tricky things like that like you know turn the pedals on with once they don't necessarily have to be those in that signal path order i think those are the things that develop over time don't you start to realize yeah so what dan's done with his board he's he's chosen a board that's just about big enough to get all his pedals on so if he now buys another pedal exactly i'm done he's he's got to buy another board yeah right yeah um or you get rid of one pedal and put another one on there so it really depends whether you want to think about longevity so for example with the bmq special here i've got plenty of options plenty of options for growth so adding another one or two pedals on there feels like it's a possibility sure um before i've got to buy my next pedal board so um that's something to think about as well is like you've got three pedals today how long is it before you're going to have six yeah so and with me i'm just going to go straight in the line because that's how the brain works yeah it means i've got a lot of dead space but that's okay what the dead space is you're going to be thinking oh if i maybe i can get that there that'll fit there yeah yeah there you go could you know that whole rail could come off you could go that small if you just wanted to make one that had two shelves on which is essentially what penetrate nano is right i've got one of those kicking around somewhere it's just two rounds but so yeah i'm going to go without going to give myself plenty of space um and in terms of order i'm going to do just for the halibut i'm going to do the opposite of down i'm going to have my cleanest pedal first i'm going to have my dirty pedal next dirtier so one of the reasons for choosing two overdrives is they have different sounds this one's kind of clean classic um with a bumpy mid-range this one is much dirtier uh with a flatter eq curve that will become relevant as we go on actually it's important to mention so the way that i say my stack mine i'm using the black box as an overdrive boost so with meg with stacking the tube screamer into the runestone he'll have like an increased gain option so um by having the the higher gain last and the lower gain first and then punching that into the higher gain thing it pushes the signal into the higher gain pedal and gives you like an increased gain so basically with these two pedals you have three uh basic gain options and which way around you place them it changes that yeah and i've already changed my mind so there you go um delay usually for most um i say for most commonly the most i don't want to say normal the accepted place for delay is after overdrive although you can put it before and i'm putting my looper on the end because i want my looper to catch everything that i play so that's going to be my order nice the next thing to consider not necessarily the next step in building your ball but you need to consider this step now is how you're actually going to attach your pedals to the board now most people use velcro we have this side of the velcro which is called the loop side and then we have the hook side of the velcro one side goes on your board one side goes in your pedals and then it sticks to it there are some common issues with said velcro the first being that it is it's certainly convenient however it's not necessarily a strong option so for example if i'm building a touring pedalboard i won't use velcro i'll use um pedalboard tape or something with it with a stronger uh adhesion to the to the pedals or i'll use pedalboard tape on the pedals and maybe hook velcro on the bottom so that it's still very strong but you can change them if you want um a really important step for tip i should say with the velcro with the hook side of the velcro uh oh sorry with the loop side of the velcro don't just put you know the the hook side on there and then the same you know the same amount uh on the board because what tends to happen is if you've only got the same amount of hook side uh velcro as the loop side then as you pull the pedal off you'll just pull the you know the base of the hook off it will come off exactly so it's always best if you have the option to use long strips of the loop side on the bottom and then it's a lot more difficult for that you know if you're pulling this pedal off here you have the extra tension on on you know either side of that that keeps that in place which is what i'm going to do now so um the way to do this personally i think it's always better to line the whole board so if you've made your own board like this if you put it on the whole board that gives you the option of moving anything around to any place you want if you very precisely cut tiny little squares out and stick that pedal there and that pedal there and that pedal there you're then very limited about how you can move it about so measure it out to the full width of the board cut it off and then stick it on making sure you have a clean and dust-free surface so we'll just measure that up a bit like that stick it on at that end and you know doing anything like this on camera means i'm going to mess it up but no awesome and if you do it like that you don't get any air bubbles in the velcro as you go along and then that will give you something to put your pedal on like so i'll just do the next one if dan can find any more velcro if you can't we're gonna have to improvise another option uh which is much less wide to use but it's still a good option is cable ties [Applause] right now the great thing about cable ties is they're once they're on you have to snip them to get them off they they really secure the pedal in place um now there's a bunch of different ways to do this a lot of people once they have the connections in place they'll actually put the cable ties in around the connections and sort of you know cable tie that to the board other people will cross so you can cable tie them on the board like that however you do it once the cable ties on that's it you have to if you want to change anything you got to cut the cable tie and then start again but once it's on though there's you know nothing will make that fall up by itself so martin smith from schmidt array god bless that man lifesaver send us some velcro to the pedalboard building that you were doing for somebody or other okay anyway so i've now got more soft side velcro great oh look at that nice what a beauty daniel now uh here's a question why does the soft side or the loop side go on the bottom and the hook side go on top um i don't actually know other than that's how you told me to do it okay oh no i do know right no i don't imagine that you've got uh you know you've taken pillars off your board and you put them on carpet or something if you've got the the hook side on there it's not going to move on the carpet most of the the floor the soft finishes on top of the board the hook will work but if you have the the loop side on the bottom then uh it just slides around all over the place so i've always i think the yeah the general consensus is the hook side on the pedal and the loop side on the board and if you always do it the same way you avoid that time where you go to put the pedal on the board you've got loop side on both sides so exactly uh it makes sense to do one so the next thing we were talking about is pedalboard tape pedal tape you refer to pedalboard tape which you can find if you search on amazon or thegiggrig.com uh you can find pedalboard tape which is actually 3m dual lock that's it and you can buy 3m dual lock under the 3m brand as well and all it is it's basically it's the same little mushrooms little mushrooms so it's the same front and back and as dan said if you use that stuff on the board and on the pedals it is an unbelievably strong bond yep so if you want to be completist you could do that so here we've got our loop side velcro i'll cut just little squares right because you don't need much and the other great thing about cutting little squares is i might as well cut that in half you can be very efficient with the tape so when it goes onto your pedal the other good thing about this stuff is on most pedals it doesn't mark you can pull it off and it won't pull the paint off most pedals yeah and i'm going to say most pedals because it's not always the case the big thing with the pedalboard tape is the glue that's using this side is is really strong it's it's so much stronger than the glue that's used on your velcro so it's a really good option you know so i put that on there and i try and put it on so that i don't cover the screws up yeah so that i can just about get to the screws if the bottom needs to come off the pedal for any reason whatsoever tube screen is going to go there so the the runestone now one thing to one thing i've just noticed which i hadn't really thought about is on all of my pedals except the ditto the jack sockets are on the top that's very handy so they the pedals can go closer together and it's not a big deal however i've got the space on the board so i can happily put a bit more space once that goes down that's good stuff yeah now getting it off is a pain in the butt i use a commonwealth garden kitchen knife come on garden which sounds sounds like you're cutting the velcro to bits but you're actually not no and that that just eases it off the board um without you know pulling the velcro off yeah that's great that sits quite nicely and that is how i attach we attach pedals to the board the downside one problem is that stuff does not stick very well to rubber to rubber that you get on the bottom of a boss pedal or on the bottom of an eyebrows pedal of this generation so we'll see how we get on we'll stick some on there and we hope it won't fall off too much so our pedals are now stuck to the board but before you do that there's one thing you need to make sure of if we have a look at the mix board here so it's mixed saying that as his in and out jacks are top mounted which means it's very easy for mick to get to the input and output checks on the pedals the way that mine have been laid out um i can still get there however if you have a look between the output of this pedal here and then the input of the memory man it's even with a really super thin board it's not that easy so what i'll do sometimes is i will actually have the pedals laid out roughly in the same the basics the same sort of shape i'm using um solder you know made to measure patch cables and i'll actually do the patch cables first and then sort of one at a time put the pedals on with the patch cables in and i'll show you how i do that but it's important to note that if you if for whatever reason you can't you know get the patch cables in when the pedals are down then having to sort of if you know if you're using pedalboard tape and they're down and that they're really fully attached it's really difficult to then start ripping things up if you've if you've cable tied your pedals down then you've got to snip all the cable ties off you know and basically start again so just make sure if you're going to attach your pedals at this stage you can get the jacks in and out if not um you either lay it out like this or another really good option is to put some paper on top of your board and then put the petals on there lay it all out and then once the cable jacks are in pull the paper out from underneath bob's your alcohol yeah do it in one bunch of flowers so the way you normally build a board is you do the layout first then you do the power next right yes so if you're coming from a collection of pedals on the floor like we were talking about an introduction you might have a combination of batteries um the supplied power adapters that you get when you buy a pedal you might have something plugged into an extension lead which is sort of trailing over towards your towards your board or you might be using a basic power supply and some daisy chains we're gonna not use daisy chains right as a rule we don't use data chains there's always a better option than using a daisy chain and as a matter of fact i you know i certainly uh are a firm believer in when you're using a board like this if you've got if you've got a hundred pounds to spend on doing a board spend 10 pounds on the actual board and 90 pounds on the house in the power supply because the power supply if your power supply is not great your pedals will never sound great yeah they'll only ever sound as good as your passive like yeah it's a very confusing thing though isn't it because there's so many power supplies on the market um they all claim lots of things and if you want to know more about power supplies and all of that please watch our vcpi episode from a couple years back clicky vic p yeah voltage current polarity isolation you need to get all of those things right if you want your pedals to go right there and we'll discuss some of those yeah uh options here daniel what power option are you using so because i've got the memory man here which draws more than a standard um just instead of 9.5 sided output will allow i am going to use the giga stuff because uh we have this timelord isolated adapter and that's going to give the memory man everything it needs hold your horses there cowboy um let's put some numbers on that first pedal how many milliamps uh one yeah three nothing sometimes seven standard overdrive pedal how many milliamps current draw uh sometimes twenty less than 100 much less than that yeah usually less than 50. yes absolutely um most tc electronic pedals around 100 100 120 something like that yeah so when you're talking about more current than a standard pedal what you mean is more than 150 milliamps more than 120 milliamps okay 20 milliamps you're that's that's quite high for a standard pedal so anything more than that i am going to look at putting it on its own high current supply so yeah you know your if you have a um and how do you know how many milliamps your your pedal draws it will say in the manual if you have any doubt whatsoever go and check the manual and it will say on the on the website uh and in the uh the specification section where it says it take where it takes nine volts the it'll say the size of the plug for for a standard um a standard nine volt plug it's 2.1 millimeter and it's sensor negative now that means the positive part of the supply is on the outside and the negative part of the supply is what they call negative tip or negative center so that's standard in the guitar industry anything different so all of these use a 2.1 center negative power supply nothing different with that the main difference with this pedal is i need to be able to supply this with at least 250 milliamps for this to do its thing yeah but everything else is very very low and you'll see if you buy something like a um strymon zoomer or um a t-rex something or whatever or a really famous one um hella power too yeah by voodoo lab that everyone uses it'll say on each of those outputs it'll say what the current supply is but you're going to use the gig regenerator which is your power supply yeah um uh the gigaway dance company makes a modular power supply which is at one end super professional powering lots of very famous people's touring boards across the world at the other end it's modular so you don't need to buy the whole thing one downside about power supplies which i've done many times is you go i'm going to buy this power supply and you buy that and then you use it for 18 months and then you realize i put this new pedal it won't do five another 500 milliamps so i've got to buy a whole new power supply so the way dan does it it's modular and therefore it can grow with you yeah yeah however you know you know it's a great power supply it works really well the most important thing though with if you're looking at a board like this you've got four pedals you need to make sure that the power supply that's going into each one of these is isolated what that means is there's not going to be an earth connection on the power and the on the negative i'm saying about the center negative there's not going to be an earth connection from that between each petal and that's going to stop earth loops which is going to make yes exactly and that's noise um so as long as your power supply is properly isolated now there are some power supplies that say they're isolated and they're not this is a really great example check this out i only learned about this recently this is a mission engineering 529 and it is interesting because it runs it off usb so you can run it off your phone charger nice if you want however as soon as you're talking about ground loops which i think is interesting if i don't run it off my phone charger and i run it off my separate battery that i carry around right to power my mobile phone and if i'm out about i need to charge my mobile phone it's just a battery that you can get so if i run that off that what what what what's the result well there's no connection between that and so there's no ground no possibility of ground loops which i i think is a pretty cool it's great it's great and and it's you know the fact that it's rechargeable so you don't have to find a yeah so what we don't know is how long it'll last yes haven't tested it yet this will be its first outing today and it doesn't stop there being grounding issues between the outputs but it says it it's isolated okay so we're going to assume that it is and as we were talking about the sign we can get a close-up of that we've got four outputs at 150 milliamps remember we were talking about the golden number being about 120 yep so we know we can power most pedals certainly all of these yes and then there's one at 500 milliamps for anything like a timeline digital yeah it takes a lot so that is a pretty cool little option i think that's fantastic and that's going to go on here in a circle perfect perfect um any any uh power supply you know the ones that plug into the wall there still should be no earth connection between the wall and the negative output on the power supply because there's a transformer in there that is isolating that but yeah the great thing about the the charge and go boards is that you know you don't have to find somewhere to plug them into the wall when you're playing you know that's brilliant i don't think that doesn't hold any charge i don't think right i think you have to power something to it okay i think we'll find out okay cool um so in terms of connecting it up do you want to do yours first sure show us how you're going to do that okay so what i'm going to do i'm going to start at this end and work my way back so i'm going to put this pedal on here now i actually want the output um from this to go into the tremolo so you know when i get back to lane these out here i'm just going to be aware that you know the passion that i make for this is going to be a bit longer but the first thing i'm going to do is plug in this time lord and i will i'm just going to put a little bit of velcro on that and attach that to the underside of the board i'm going to do the same one thing to think about when you put your power supply underneath the pedalboard is look where all the outputs are yeah if it's something like a t-rex or a voodoo lab it's going to have an iec or mains outlet on it so that needs to be somewhere that you can physically get to for example if you put it if the iec was here and you put it in there you can't get the the iec in and you think what idiot would do that i've done it many times so you all your ins and outs need to be accessible and then it's a case of simply picking a place that feels relevant actually on that front some pedal boards are completely flat which means you have to put your pedal your power supply up top yes which is fine if you've got room but if you don't have room a pedalboard that has a little bit of raise on it now you'll see um this happens to be my little uh metro 16 and i've customized it here with this rail well interestingly exactly that reason the reason i asked you if this was yours because i've got one liz i did exactly the same thing so um same as the same as you would for a pedal look i would use pedalboard tape both sides for power supply yes absolutely because it doesn't really need to move so all it goes i'm going very very short on pedal board tape so this will prove whether you can actually use really tiny bits or not and you can see relatively to the size of the supply that's actually quite a small amount of tape is a bit like we're using so that's almost definitely going to fall off um such as the professionalism of how we work daniel and i'm going to stick that in there like that nice and i've put a safety soft thing down underneath my pedals don't get damaged and they hit the table you see there's enough room here for mick to get the usb in for when he needs to charge it again yep so when you buy power supply such as the mission here or any of the other kind of all-in-one power supplies they usually come with connection leads now depending on your pedal type you'll have different types of connector most modern pedals use that barrel style connector which dan was talking about earlier one end goes in the power supply one end goes in the pedal um and you can make a choice there's a straight one and an angled one um often on top mount pedals for example the power supply inlet will often be between the jacks so you could potentially use a right angle one if you've got enough room to get the jack in sometimes depending on how it's positioned and if there isn't enough room it can make more sense to use the straight one because then your jacks can definitely go in beside it but that's that's up to you um yeah completely up to you how you want to do it same uh goes for the for the power supply it might be that the right angle ones will all fit in it might be that sometimes they don't because they're too spaced too closely together i've had that on power supplies before or you're trying to get them all in so whichever way you do it one end in the supply one in the pedal taking care to make sure you're connecting the right thing to the right thing bearing in mind voltage polarity current and isolation that was actually key not wikipedia i'm basically doing the same thing as mech but because my power supply requirements are a little bit more complicated so i have to use that extra adapter to power the the memory man the way this supplier works is i've attached the so this is the main supply this is the generator that sits on top that is going down to here this is the distributor and that is going to send power to the isolator there's four isolated nine volt outputs on here that will go to the four lower current pedals and then the time mod here it's going to be connected by the distributor and that will be powering the memory man one thing about making pedalboards is even a simple pedal board like this could be quite time consuming as you can see it's getting dark i've got to the point where i've connected all my power i only had four to connect as i mentioned on the back here of the 529 all the leads come through everything's where it needs to go so i just want to tidy that up a little bit by because i've got all this spare cable which i just need to make sure isn't going to get snagged on um you know whatever else goes underneath the board so i'm just going to gather it up there's probably a neater way to do this but i'm just going to gather it up and i'm going to put cable time around it which feels kind of permanent but it literally takes three seconds just to snip if you've got a problem so i mean ideally i would have checked that everything's working first but anyway um so we'll do that i'll just snip the end off of that and then in true diy nasty fashion i'll probably just put a bit of tape over there just to hold that down which is neither professional nor it won't last forever but it will do for now right exactly it's important to only use orange orange tape because it sounds better than the black tape no question no question orange is sort of that pedal shows color in a way so uh so yeah that's not going to tour you wouldn't want to put that on a plane um or subject it to too much problematicness but it is going to hold for now for the purposes of our requirements happy days there we go powered up now i'll test if it works so the correct way to do this is before you've just velcroing cable tied anything down but i've got my little battery here big battery that end in there this end underneath and i've just about left enough room to get the usb thing in there the blue lights come on which means it's working and i can just check up top delay works ditto's working runestone is working tube screamer is working great so i can go ahead and do my um patch cables should i do that daniel should you do that okay so down still wiring um i'm going to use off the shelf patch cables because i've got them um dan's going to do some make your own ones so this is just an off the shelf these are free the tone but you know everyone makes patch cables some that i particularly like never actually use them in anger but these rock bag ones um have this flat very flat profile so if you've got not got much space that can be a good idea i do worry a bit because they look unrepairable and i don't like things that aren't repairable uh but anyway another option these soldered nice professional will last forever potentially i've decided that the pedals are going to go in this order as we discussed and then it's a case of just connecting the pedals so you can just get a patch cable of the appropriate length connect them up that's a bit awkward bit too almost a bit too short that one which is you know bothering me in an ocd fashion but we're gonna stick with it um a couple more slightly longer one for this connection i was talking about this earlier about the uh where the power comes out and where the jack plug goes in and sometimes that can create a problem for like here for example with the ditto so i'm trying i want to plug my patch cable in there it won't go in because it's just annoying me so little little things like that little orientation issues can drive you mad as they're driving me mad at this point so you just need to work around it make sure sometimes it might mean repositioning the pedal in this case it's just me not being nice incredibly dumb you could also thread that one under here and come up here yeah okay so should you should or shouldn't you put your cables under and over upside is keeps the top of the board neater can use a length of cable that your that you don't need on the top of the board downside it can get tangled under there and potentially snag on things so as you can see underneath the board here that's quite a lot of loose cable so could get caught on something potentially but i'm not gonna worry too much about that in this instance there you go so my guitar comes in here into the tube screamer into the runestone out of the runestone into the delay out of the delay into the ditto out to my amplifier my pedalboard daniel is ready to go oh man you smashed it okay my power is done i'll double check that now so everything turns on except this one but you need to remember certain pedals only turn on when you have the input jack plugged in so there we go everything's turned on happy days now i'll make the audio connections so what i'm doing to make the audio connections i'm actually using these are the the cables i use in all my professional builds uh this is the evidence audio sis system the screw-in solder system it uses a very specific sort of cable this is a solid core cable so it's different to most uh solderless systems in the fact that the the core is solid and that screws directly into the tip but what i like about these is you can cut them to length and make them exactly the length you need them for the board one tip i would say if you can if i'm doing a board for a specific tour and these are the pedals and that's it that i'll make the cables you know really neat exactly to length if if it's a board that is going to be you know that's a nice pedal but i might swap it out something later if you can leave a little bit of headroom in the length of the cable so that you've got a little bit of leeway um i have got just to prove dan's point i've got a bag of two short patch cables here ones that i've made and then when i got my new pedalboard even lengths that were that long weren't long enough to do the new pedalboard so i've got this cable is expensive right yes and it's crazy expensive there's probably 50 quid worth of off cuts in this blowing bag and jack plugs still the reason i'm keeping it is because it will live again yes the other thing that's really important if you're making your own cable is that a lot of the times with this sort of cable that the earth is simply pushed against the inside of the plug now that's fine but if for whatever reason i don't have an earth connection between this pedal and this pedal then i don't have an earth connection between my guitar and the amplifier so it's really important uh that you make sure that the you're not only getting the audio through from tip to tip but the earth connections are good as well so ideally you would be testing these it's a minefield isn't it the the make your own cables i i had a problem on my big pedal board uh before we did our show a week or so ago my tuesday was buzzing and you remember in a couple of shows i was like my tube scream is buzzing something's wrong i just need to fix it there was a cable it was a cable but interestingly all the rest of my cables on my board are these right which we've made carefully with the screw in and everything this was a lesser cable with a less good connection right and surprise surprise that's the one that's gone wrong and if i'm honest the reason i've used these ready-made high quality is because i've got to a point where i don't really trust anything apart from that yeah so i don't have time to make those i've got these i trust these they're soldered they're high quality that's what i'm going to use sure okay so i'm just going to go through finish off this cabling and then the board is ready to go final thing i think it always helps to name your pedalboard damn as you can see i've called mine axis board of love all right very nice very nice even though it's not jimmy inspired no so would you want to call yours then uh what was the name of the computer in space odyssey 2001. how hell this is hell here we are then axis board of love and how and are in place um let's start with you okay check everything works all right so my straight through tone so there's no buffers on this board this is the direct straight through the rehab [Music] so that's the ac 15 and it's set up to be a little bit just broken up just a little bit uh okay so this [Music] is [Music] [Music] right uh this is the black box [Music] [Music] fabulous awesome delay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] not much wrong with that killer so go and gig that tomorrow i could absolutely take that to a gig tomorrow yeah and get you know most of what i need very cool very very cool indeed okay uh so i'm using dan was using a vox ac 15 with a greenback speaker i'm using a blues junior with whatever the standard speaker comes in the blues junior and that is a version three blues junior not the newest one which is version four okay in straight into the amp sounds like this [Music] great sound quite middly yeah but really focused and crispy lots of presents lots of presents these saddles are giving me lots of presents which we'll come back to in another video ts10 tube screamer [Music] bye [Music] runestone which is the more blues breakery higher game thing oh hello ladies okay we've got some let's come back to that one we've got some trouble there okay okay i think i know what it is actually okay i know the pedal functions well because i had it on my pedalboard yesterday okay so i know that there's nothing wrong with the pedal okay which you wouldn't know if you're building your first pedalboard or a pedalboard but i know that pedal is functioning right because i had it on my own big pedalboard yesterday and it was hammering okay okay so let's come back to that one come back to that one okay echosex [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] right so we know everything's working nicely except this is not working so can i just say yep this sounds unreal isn't it good unreal yeah quite pleased with that yep okay so [Music] i know what that is dan okay i've experienced it many times before that is not isolated there is some noise getting to that pedal from another pedal how we're going to diagnose it we're going to first of all we're going to try another power socket right just to make sure that it's not this specific one so we'll try the tube screen or one okay same jobby same job okay i think i suspected this might be the case because we've said it a million times not all power supplies are created equal which is not to say anything bad about the uh the mission one but it's very rare that they work brilliantly uh and there's usually some sort of isolation issue somewhere on the line so this is going to prove if there is an isolation issue okay this is a giga virtual battery which will isolate so it's a separate isolation device exactly now it was only happening on this pedal yep so maybe there is something particular about the runestone that's fussy yeah but that's going to happen right um that's going to happen you're going to have pedals that have got different requirements and different levels of fussiness can we hear it with that on there we go so voltage current polarity isolation isolation and there we are [Music] me [Music] [Music] [Music] again [Music] uh [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] now [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] my oh [Music] [Laughter] there we go brilliant good job brilliant build your first pedalboard make a space movie by the end of the day fabulous there you go guys i really hope you enjoyed that i thought that was an absolute blast that was brilliant really good fun yeah really great fun okay a massive thank you to our patrons on patreon uh these guys support us and so couldn't do it without you thank you so much thank you also massive thank you to everyone that's gone to thatpedalshowstore.com and purchased a t-shirt or strings or a dnm drive or a hat or garden utensils coasters there we go notebooks um your own satellite uh suv following thing uh massive thank you to our preferred retailers in the uk and europe is anderson's music of guildford surrey where you can probably buy most of this stuff yes but not that because they don't make it anymore okay uh in the us of a uh riff city guitar of new anyway various locations definitely buying one of these uh also to our friends in australia matt at pedal empire in brisbane queensland australia awesome hope you enjoyed that guys also please subscribe if you haven't subscribed have a fantastic week and we'll see you soon bye [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: That Pedal Show

Views: 510,212

Keywords: how to build a pedalboard, build a pedalboard, pedalboard build best pedal board, that pedal show, first pedal board, when to build a pedalboard, schmidt array, pedaltrain, Alder and ash pedalboards, best power supply, best pedal power, mission 751, mission 751 power supply

Id: y_Ymybn-8jA

Length: 69min 16sec (4156 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/slap_me_thrice]

This episode looks like it might have some potentially useful advice for the novice pedalers amongst us....

...let's see!

[u/DWTBPlayer]

I'm watching this episode right tf now. And not because of this post.

Get out of my head!