behind the bench

after curating the pedalboard from hell exhibit at the various ampshows in LA and NYC, i thought it would be a great time to share a few of the things i learned from the experience

 

 

 

pedalboards are getting more and more popular with players, and like all great things, they seem to get bigger and more complicated. think of each connection as a potential failure point.

each pedal you add exponentially increases your chance of having a problem. 

and since you only have one signal path for your guitar, it should be critical to make sure that each point of failure is eliminated as best you can.

the biggest enemies of a pedalboard are poor power to the pedal units themselves, pedal units in poor condition or unreliable, and poor signal getting through the entire signal chain. 

some of the things to think about when connecting up a pedalboard are: 

• clean those contacts! - even new pedals can come with a bit of film on the parts from the factory, add a few years of grime, stage schmutz, dust, and a pinch of moisture or beer or whatever and you have a recipe of crust cake. i personally have had contacts on a brand new unit start malfunctioning after 4 months of constant use 2 times a week. if your contacts aren’t clean, you don’t know what the real pr0blem might be with the connection. you can hear things like distortion, weak signal, crosstalk, all kinds of crazy stuff from a ‘partial’ connection inside a pedal or a guitar or amp. and think about that 20+ year old original speaker connector inside that vintage cabinet? eeeeeeeesh. 

 

• think about solder - i am a big fan of instant things. instant coffee, instant pizza, even instant karma. i dont believe that twist on, mechanical connectors are doing anyone any favors. there is the illusion of a permanent electrical connection, but unlike a light switch or stereo connection, instrument cables get bent all over the place, shaken up in the trunk of rusty pickup trucks and gear boxes, and what about the hours of vibration from sound on a stage or studio from bass amps, drums, flying leg kick singers (i’m looking at you david lee roth) when you are actually playing? also, copper tarnishes when exposed to air. look at a penny to see what happens when copper gets in contact with air, and a bit of moisture. crimp connections cannot seal against air, unless you are swaging the metals together. if you have one of those handy DIY pedalboard kits, do yourself a favor, measure, cut and test fit your new cables, but please, please, find someone to solder the connectors onto the wire. if you dont do this simple step, figure on having to recut and fit clean wire every few months. 

 

• watch for play - when you step on a pedal you are putting a small amount of lateral torsion on the connectors each time you stomp down. repeat this hundreds of times, and you can get a metal fatigue failure in the cable or separated solder joint. thats why we use patch connectors with very long backshells to disperse lateral stress on the cable and ensure that the solder connection and the connector itself has maximum mechanical strength to protect your signal. 

 

• shielding is a good thing - a pedalboard is not your guitar signals best friend. depending on what’s on there, there are power supplies, lights, high voltage, sympathetic, or parasitic signals and even data firing all around your notes that come off your scatterwound pickupped axe-o-love. a lot of low priced patch cables are straight wire on both contacts, or have extremely poor shielding (if any). don’t forget that copper costs money, and the less copper wire that is packed into a cable, the cheaper it can be made for. we use as much copper for our each conductor in our instrument cables as some speaker cables!

 

• playing is why you do this, right? - i’ve spoken with a lot of people about what they put up with on their pedalboards, and it just astounds me. i hear stories of guys having to tear things apart time after time and twiddle with this connection, or re cut and torque that connector, just to ‘get things working again’ and i wonder why on earth you would want to keep coming back and fixing something that you already fixed 100 times before. i’m lazy, and i like doing things one time, and moving on to something else.. like playing my guitar! i think i would lose my mind if i had to be the guy tearing apart his board backstage 5 minutes before i did a gig to try and find that one buggered connector that was taking my whole rig down. each thing you have that might have been ‘free’ or ‘cheap’.. take a long hard look at the real cost to you: time, stress and derailing your creative energies away from more important things, like music!

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