Building a Custom Boutique Guitar Pedalboard – Part II

After you have your initial design for your pedalboard sketched out, you should start thinking about what – and who – you will need to make your design a physical reality.

I wanted my board to be fully integrated with power and on-board jacks. Yours doesn’t have to be this involved – as I said in the first installment, you can have a little as a board and some velcro. You just need to know what you want your finished board to be, then start planning for what materials you will need.

Do you want to go with simply painting the wood? Would you rather a shiny varnish over the natural wood grain? Would you like to apply tolex (that’s the leather-grain looking stuff you find on guitar amps – it is usually black, but does come in many colors and patterns). For my pedal board, I went with purple tolex! This also meant that I needed to estimate how much tolex I would need, as well as tolex glue to affix it to the wood. If you are opting to go with varnish or paint, you’ll need to figure out how much you’re going to need.

I chose to go with tolex – I just like the way it looks, even when it gets beat, worn and ripped. I figure I would probably only do something like this once, so I might as well do it the best I can. I bought a roll of purple tolex off Ebay (just search for tolex), and I bought the glue online

As I said earlier, I chose to go with having a powered board. This isn’t really necessary, but all of the cool boards I had seen had these nifty little power plugs on the side, where you could just attach a power cord. Believe it or not, this was the toughest item to find! I looked everywhere – Lowe’s, Home Depot, and even some small local electronic stores. Could not find one anywhere. I did finally find one online. If you want to go this route, you need to look for an A/C recessed male plug. I found it at a place called ProSound.

Of course that plug won’t power itself, so I also needed an extension cord to go back to my rack, if necessary, to plug in. Sometimes, clubs will have power drops near the front of the stage, but most don’t, so I needed to have at least a 20ft cord to run back to the Furman power supply in my rack. I would also need to construct a snake for myself – more on that later.

The recessed plug also needed to GO somewhere to provide power for the peals, so I bought a Furman plug lock strip, I think from Same Day Music. The plug locks are nice for any wall warts you might have. I needed to attach the Furman’s power cord to the recessed one – essentially just replacing the existing plug with the recessed one. Again – I am dangerous with a screwdriver, so I had my dad help me out with this. It’s really not a big deal – and once he showed me, I was pretty much able to do it myself. I just don’t like messing with electrical things – even if they’re not plugged in, and if you are as clueless as I am about these things, I don’t recommend you do either.

(I originally bought a Visual Sound 1 SPOT Combo to power most of my pedals, but ran into some noise, and later added a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power to the top of my board. I do still need the Furman strip underneath though, because I have a few standard plugs and a few wall warts yet, as well as some logistical issues with the lenghts of the little power plugs they supply with the Pedal Power.)

Next up, I needed to plan how I would wire all of this with cables. On-board, I decided to go with George L’s, since I could cut them to custom lengths. I realize some people have mixed feelings about these, and I have actually had problems with them fritzing out on me, but that could just be because I didn’t make them correctly to begin with. On the upside, they’re easy to fix – just snip and re-affix the jack! For this reason, I ALWAYS left a little extra play in the cable when wiring the board.

Aside from wiring the pedals together, I needed to wire the inputs and outputs of the board. I wanted the board to have its own patch bay on the side, and I needed to figure out exactly how many ins and outs I would need. I decided to use Neutrik 1/4″ locking jacks – locking is a nice feature, because if you trip over your cords, they will NOT pull out. To remove, you just press the little red tab on the jack and pull the cord out.

I figured out that I would need 5 jacks – one IN from the guitar/wireless, one OUT to my main amp, one OUT to a second amp (a clean amp I sometimes used), and an IN and OUT to the effects loop on my main amp. I opted to use 21′ Monster Cables for these, angled on one end, straight on the other. I wrapped my snake of cables with three 5′ Audioskin cable organizers (who I believe have unfortunately gone out of business), leaving some leeway on the straight cable end of the snake, to reach the amps. The angled end would be plugging into the Neutriks on the board.

Next time, I’ll c0ntinue with the planning of the pedalboard project.

Share on Facebook

Bookmark It

Hide Sites