Project: DIY Pedal Board

This isn't one of my regular girly craft projects. But what can I say? I'm multi-faceted. I have my first show as a one woman band on Wednesday. My pedals, in their natural state, would be a pain in the ass to transport/set up. So I did what I had to do. I made a pedal board. Unfortunately, the only right angle patch cable I have is 3 'long  and curly. I had to use it to make the set up work. Once I get the appropriate cables there won't need to be so much space between everything, And I'll will have room on my board for at least one new toy.

Anyway, please read on. Even if you don't know anything about guitar or effects processors, at least you get to see a bad ass side of my craftiness that you've never seen before...

Ok here we go. The first thing I did was get a board, some heavy-duty, sticky-back, hook and loop fastener (aka velcro) and some gorilla tape.

 I found this piece of laminate in my crawl space. I'm pretty sure it used to be the the shelf of a cheap entertainment center.

Next, I  covered the board neatly with with tape. I could have just left it wood grain. But, really? A pedal board should be black. One's whole set up just looks neater that way. Don't you think?

 If I were using plain old plywood, the tape would make a clean, smooth surface for the velcro to adhere to. But in this case, it is purely cosmetic.

Here we see my pedals after I applied velcro to the bottoms. I had to remove the rubber feet from the electro-harmonics pedals but that was easy. I just kind of scraped them off with scissors.

Before I stuck velcro on the board, I set up my pedals with all the cables plugged in. As I mentioned above, I really only had cables with straight connectors and they take up a lot of room. The amount of space on either side of that holy grail is pretty ridiculous. I will get some right angle cables soon, and everything will fit a lot better. For now, this will work. I plan on adding more pedals anyway.

(That long curly cable is the only right angle cable that I have right now. I had to use it or I wouldn't have been able to access the mic input on my loop station.)

Once I had the lay-out all squared away, I put my velcro down. I wanted to cover the whole thing in velcro. But the heavy duty stuff is expensive, so I just put it where it was needed. And  this stuff really is heavy duty. Not only does it hold my pedals securely, they are kind of hard to pull off even when I want to. That's a good thing.

There is is. It's a very simple thing but so important if you use multiple effects. I feel like a real guitar player now. Even though I play electric mandolin. I don't want to go into too much detail about my signal flow or anything like that but if you have any technical questions about my set up feel free to ask.

Thanks for Reading,

XO

D