The six pedalboard mistakes I see at every gig.
I've been the guy in the basement watching openers tear down. These keep happening.
I play out a lot, and when I'm not playing I'm usually the guy in the basement of some bar watching openers tear down and load in. I have, by now, looked at probably four hundred pedalboards in their natural habitat — duct-taped, beer-stained, partially powered, occasionally on fire. The same six mistakes show up over and over again.
I'm not going to bullet-point these because the moment you bullet-point them they stop being arguments and start being a checklist, and a checklist is something you skim. I want you to actually read these. Each one is a paragraph. Pour a coffee.
The first mistake is buying a power supply that's too small. Specifically: people buy an 8-output isolated supply because they have six pedals, figure they have room to grow, and then six months later they have eleven pedals, two of which are digital and draw 300mA each, and they're chaining a daisy-cable off the back of an output that's already loaded. Now they have a ground hum they can't trace and they're posting on Reddit about it. The fix is to buy a power supply that has 50 percent more outputs than you currently need and at least one high-current output even if you don't currently own a high-current pedal. You will. Everyone does. The pedalboard is a gas — it expands to fill its container.
The second mistake is signal-chain order they read on a forum once and never reconsidered. Wah, then comp, then drive, then mod, then delay, then reverb — fine, that's the textbook, but the textbook is a starting point and most people freeze there. Try comp after drive. Try reverb before delay. Try the fuzz at the end of the chain into a clean amp. The order changes everything and almost nobody experiments because they're afraid of looking like they don't know what they're doing.
The third mistake is patch cables that cost less than the pedals. I'm not going to tell you to buy Mogami because the marketing on cables is mostly nonsense, but I will tell you that the no-name solderless kit you got off Amazon is going to fail on you at the worst possible moment. Buy decent right-angle pancakes. Solder if you can. If you can't, pay someone twenty bucks to do it.
The fourth mistake is too many pedals doing the same job. I see boards with three overdrives that all sound the same with different labels. lo.flannery, bless him, runs a twelve-pedal board through a Twin and three of those pedals are essentially mid-hump overdrives with slightly different voicings. He knows. He doesn't care. He's allowed because the board is part of the bit. You are probably not allowed.
The fifth mistake is no tuner, or a tuner that's buried in the chain so you can't use it for a mute. Put the tuner first. Make it a true bypass with a mute when engaged. This is free.
The sixth mistake is the velcro. Specifically: using thin velcro on a smooth-bottom pedal and then complaining when it falls off during the bridge of the third song. Use the thick stuff. Use a lot of it. Pre-roughen the bottom of the pedal with sandpaper if you have to. Your future self, mid-solo, will not regret this.
— Jason
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