Pedalboard
Some folks have been asking me about my pedalboard. It seems to be under continuous refinement but here is the latest version.
Topside the board features a Road Rage True Bypass Effects Loop (TBEL) — the long rectangular silver pedal with lots of switches and jacks. I use this pedal to switch between the various effects and to keep the signal chain as clean as possible. The folks at Road Rage added a buffer for me as well as a dedicated tuner out.
The chain basically goes from guitar into the TBEL. The sequence of effects starts with the Ernie Ball Volume Pedal followed by the Fulltone Clyde Wah. From there, I have three different overdrives: Tim, Fulltone OCD and Xotic BB+. This allows me to go from sparkle to crunch and high gain sustain. Following the overdrives are three delay units: Strymon El Capistan Tape Delay, TC Electronics Nova Delay and the Diamond Memory Lane 2 Analog Delay. I have them on the lower end of the pedal board because I need to tap tempo when these units are engaged. Unfortunately neither the Strymon nor the TC Electronics units support an external tap tempo. I do know of a few folks that can mod the Nova Delay pedal but I have my eye on a new delay pedal. There is also a Korg Pitch Black dual input tuner — I generally find that somebody needs to plug in and tune at gigs and I have a spare input always at the ready. And then the signal leaves the TBEL out to the guitar amp.
Underneath the pedalboard two Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 units provide power to the pedals. You can see that I have dressed the cables as cleanly as possible keeping reasonable separation between power and audio lines.
The pedalboard itself is the Pedaltrain Pro. It is big. It is heavy. I need to simplify my pedalboard.
Hi, Richard, great minds think alike – I have been playing around with my board too; most recently by adding the El Capistan Tape Delay as well. The tonal effects are amazing, as I am sure you have found out. The trouble is, I don’t have time to play with all the settings as much as I would like.
I, too have the TBEL, however I am finding the buttons just a bit close together – in hindsight, I should have purchased the bigfoot model – but I’m only a size 9. I may consider trading it in for such.
Are you finding the same when activating devices?
Rob
The El Capistan is one awesome pedal but like you I found that there is an overwhelming range of tones. I had to find a few general purpose settings to live with on that pedal.
My TBEL is a bigfoot and I have no issues switching with it. Mind you, I did have to practice switching and tapping when moving around the different delays. I never knew that a guitarist needed to use his feet to play 🙂