Board plans

Yeah agreed! Fractal should make some single pedals tbh.
I agree.
Sounds like you're a candidate for a Strymon multi all in one tbh!!!
Agreed again though it would depend a lot on execution. I love having all the dedicated controls and no menus to deal with. That said if someone can do it, I would expect Strymon to make something that is nice to use. I always wonder what they plan to do with the Bigsky/Timeline/Mobius because those are over 10 years old already. I always thought they'd release replacements in the Volante/Nightsky form factor but so far that hasn't happened. Interested to see where they plan to go with their new smaller pedal size.

I think this is the thing... I want both - one button switching some of the time... and then the freedom to improvise tones on the fly at other times. Tricky to find a way to do that properly on the Helix IMHO.
Helix's pedal edit and stomp box modes are probably the best example of that. Of course with it all still being tied to presets it's not quite the same as tweaking some pedals on the fly.

Despite what I said about the big screen on G3, I'm not too fussed about scribble strips and things like that. When I'm playing live I take my glasses off anyway (mid solo sometimes lolololol) and I can barely read a thing.
Getting laser eye surgery has been one of the best things I've spent money on.

Colours and large icons tend to be more useful to me, none of the modellers really do that. G3 doesn't either, but at least I can remember what all 14 switches do at any point, and I can do that without labelling them.
The Morningstar MC6 Pro actually does, color strips and icons, though I have no idea how visible they are when the screens are pretty small. Next best thing is probably just the color codings on Helix or Fractal footswitches. I have found myself relying on scribble strip texts, otherwise I eventually forget what was what.
 
I always thought they'd release replacements in the Volante/Nightsky form factor but so far that hasn't happened.
Yeaaahhh, I always thought they'd do that too. So far... nothing. I didn't really jive with the Nightsky... but maybe I should give it another go. Seems more like a pedal that would work better with synths than guitar to me.

Getting laser eye surgery has been one of the best things I've spent money on.
I keep thinking about that too!! I've got astigmatism, which can be corrected at around £5000 per-eye, something like that. That aint no chump change!
 
You've got small feet? Because otherwise the space for the EXP pedal might be tight. Same goes for the space between the Ditto and the G3, the left Ditto switch is awfully close to the rightmost G3 switch.
 
Size 10's, so not small, not huge. I dunno. Women tell me I have big hands all the time.

I guess I'll have to suck it and see, can't be any worse than the Randy Quaid Sanchez Cortezio Ramirez machine.
 
Fwiw, I'd really think about a custom board chassis. With the Gigrig on top, you will perhaps run into cable issues. IMO any loop switcher's outlets should be below the actual board level. It's neither tough nor expensive to get a custom chassis. Paid around €30 for mine at a local case builder, used case plywood, they would cut it for me and all I had to do was screwing it together and slap velcro on top. Won't be much heavier, either. Look, all cables nicely below the board (with one of the main advances being that I can use straight plugs on the loopswitcher side):
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I never did get this off the ground!!

I still have the G3, but I've sold most of my pedals over the last month or two. I will eventually put a board together with the G3, but I'm being really undecisive about what I want to get.
 
but I'm being really undecisive about what I want to get.

Do you at least know what you want the board to be able to do and how the best compromise between operability and flexibility would look like? As obvious as it might be, carefully thinking about these made a whole lot of a difference for me, and as a result of a) fooling around with my current board for quite some time by now and b) that very thinking around, my next built (which is supposed to possibly become the last serious board I'll build in my life - simply because I'm having enough of it) is pretty much done in my head.
 
Do you at least know what you want the board to be able to do and how the best compromise between operability and flexibility would look like? As obvious as it might be, carefully thinking about these made a whole lot of a difference for me, and as a result of a) fooling around with my current board for quite some time by now and b) that very thinking around, my next built (which is supposed to possibly become the last serious board I'll build in my life - simply because I'm having enough of it) is pretty much done in my head.
Essentially I want the GigRig G3 to be my command centre for the entire rig. Think of it as a posher version of Helix snapshots. So it needs to switch the guitar amp via midi, switch pedal presets via midi, change parameters via midi, and it needs to be able to do all of the above at once but also it needs to be able to switch just the amp or just the effects - the G3 definitely covers all that. A bonus of the G3 is that I can change the order of the loops on the fly.

Now for playing our older material I need a few specific things:
  1. An 'Adriatic' style delay (so basically a modified analog delay with plenty of high frequency retention) to create screamy oscillations. A tape delay would also cover this if needs be.
  2. Regular digital delay, but with plenty of echoes that don't disappear too quickly.
  3. A reverse delay that is nice and smooth.
  4. An analog slapback delay.
  5. A nice bright hall reverb.
  6. A larger reverb that can be hall or plate.
  7. A 100% wet reverb that I can use to swell notes in a particular way.
  8. A compressor that I can move around the signal chain.
  9. My Boss SD-1w for boost and/or overdrive duties.
  10. My Lehle Mono Volume, for smooth volume swells and rolling back the gain on drive sounds.
  11. Octave down pitch effect, that can be blended in.
  12. A pitch whammy that I can set heel down to root note, and toe up to a 5th, and that can do a very slow and smooth pitch shift between the two.
  13. Phaser.
  14. EQ.
  15. Pattern tremolo.
  16. My 535 wah.

All that to say.... I think the Stryfecta plus a HX Stomp would get me everything I need.
 
Essentially I want the GigRig G3 to be my command centre for the entire rig. Think of it as a posher version of Helix snapshots.

Yeah, that was sort of obvious (to me at least, using loopswitchers since decades already).
I was actually more interested in the useability aspect. Which, in my case at least, is asking for trouble.

For instance:
I think the Stryfecta plus a HX Stomp would get me everything I need.

Soundwise, that would defenitely be the case for me, but useability would be way less than ideal.
I usually just can't program entire setlists of presets, I rather need to have pretty instant access and certain global options. But I still need to be able to switch through a good amount of rather different sounds (usually, as a minimum requirement, that'd be 4, better 6 and ideally 8-10) quickly. I have this all sorted at least quite well for the kind of gigs I'm playing, but it's just "quite well", not perfect - and to make matters worse, I also want/need some kind of a playground in addition to the above. Like a patch (plus perhaps a variation of that patch) I can use for free gain and FX scaling, whatever. That "free playground" is the very thing I really need to spend some more thoughts on. If both money and (even more so) space were no issues, I could possibly start buiilding right away. But at least space is a very, very important issue. I need this to be transportable on a bike trailer (or cargo e-bike in the more or less near future, when the car is finally gone) and at least occasionally I also need to be able to haul the thing in and out of trains.

Okok, I'll stop as these are my personal issues, totally unrelated to yours - but from my experience, this is what most people building more or less complexed pedalboards (for me, "complexed" starts at the moment you need to involve a loop switcher and one or the other additional programmable device) will be dealing with. And more often than not, it's likely the reason why they will tear fully functional pedalboards apart again and again, investing yet some more time and money, just to come up with something still not ideal.
And because of all that, before I even think about ordering anything for what at least theoretically should become my last bigger board, I'm trying to think about as much details as possible, especially in terms of operability (which includes form factor, accessability and what not).

To give you an incredibly stupid example (again: my personal issue, likely totally different from yours, but you get the idea): I need a programmable delay/reverb unit with global tap tempo. Given that pretty much each and every modeler on earth (even the cheapest) does that as a side-job, I was looking for dedicated devices. Had an eye on both the TC Plethora (either the X3 or the X5) and the Mooer Ocean Machine. Both pretty much perfectly doing what I need - just no global tap tempo. And not even supporting tap tempo via external switches (wtf, are they serious?!?). Ended up using a cheesy Zoom G3 as an intermediate solution and finally bought an HX Stomp for these things. Soundwise and regarding some functionality, I'd vastly prefered the Plethora (I absolutely dig the Mash function), but it's a no go.

As said, just an example, but from all I ever experienced, this is the very kind of stuff you're dealing with all the times when building pedalboards. And IMO it's really important to care about that stuff. I mean, one of the main reasons we're building pedalboards would be that we want things to be a) personalized and b) perfect, right? Otherwise, there'd be tons of MFX units. You can always get one and maybe add 1-2 specialized devices, done. But that's not what you usually want from a pedalboard.

Sorry for all that blurb.
 
Yeah, that was sort of obvious (to me at least, using loopswitchers since decades already).
I was actually more interested in the useability aspect. Which, in my case at least, is asking for trouble.

For instance:


Soundwise, that would defenitely be the case for me, but useability would be way less than ideal.
I usually just can't program entire setlists of presets, I rather need to have pretty instant access and certain global options. But I still need to be able to switch through a good amount of rather different sounds (usually, as a minimum requirement, that'd be 4, better 6 and ideally 8-10) quickly. I have this all sorted at least quite well for the kind of gigs I'm playing, but it's just "quite well", not perfect - and to make matters worse, I also want/need some kind of a playground in addition to the above. Like a patch (plus perhaps a variation of that patch) I can use for free gain and FX scaling, whatever. That "free playground" is the very thing I really need to spend some more thoughts on. If both money and (even more so) space were no issues, I could possibly start buiilding right away. But at least space is a very, very important issue. I need this to be transportable on a bike trailer (or cargo e-bike in the more or less near future, when the car is finally gone) and at least occasionally I also need to be able to haul the thing in and out of trains.

Okok, I'll stop as these are my personal issues, totally unrelated to yours - but from my experience, this is what most people building more or less complexed pedalboards (for me, "complexed" starts at the moment you need to involve a loop switcher and one or the other additional programmable device) will be dealing with. And more often than not, it's likely the reason why they will tear fully functional pedalboards apart again and again, investing yet some more time and money, just to come up with something still not ideal.
And because of all that, before I even think about ordering anything for what at least theoretically should become my last bigger board, I'm trying to think about as much details as possible, especially in terms of operability (which includes form factor, accessability and what not).

To give you an incredibly stupid example (again: my personal issue, likely totally different from yours, but you get the idea): I need a programmable delay/reverb unit with global tap tempo. Given that pretty much each and every modeler on earth (even the cheapest) does that as a side-job, I was looking for dedicated devices. Had an eye on both the TC Plethora (either the X3 or the X5) and the Mooer Ocean Machine. Both pretty much perfectly doing what I need - just no global tap tempo. And not even supporting tap tempo via external switches (wtf, are they serious?!?). Ended up using a cheesy Zoom G3 as an intermediate solution and finally bought an HX Stomp for these things. Soundwise and regarding some functionality, I'd vastly prefered the Plethora (I absolutely dig the Mash function), but it's a no go.

As said, just an example, but from all I ever experienced, this is the very kind of stuff you're dealing with all the times when building pedalboards. And IMO it's really important to care about that stuff. I mean, one of the main reasons we're building pedalboards would be that we want things to be a) personalized and b) perfect, right? Otherwise, there'd be tons of MFX units. You can always get one and maybe add 1-2 specialized devices, done. But that's not what you usually want from a pedalboard.

Sorry for all that blurb.
All valuable thoughts.

In terms of complexity, the Strymon big boxes are really as complex as I would want to go. The Boss 500 series are simultaneously deeper and annoying, but also not as capable and don't sound as good to me out of the box. I sold them recently for this reason.

It kinda blows my mind that there isn't very much out there that competes with the Big Sky and Timeline even after a decade!
 
It kinda blows my mind that there isn't very much out there that competes with the Big Sky and Timeline even after a decade!

Same here. Maybe people think they just could not compete?

Along similar lines, from all I know, there's at least quite some people looking for "spatial" boxes, combining and concentrating on delays and reverbs. Makes a lot of sense to combine these two as well. I mean, you usually don't really need inserts between the two (sure, inserting something into a delay feedback loop a la Timeline is wicked and all that - but in most cases, people just don't do that), their functionality pretty much deeply interacts and what not. So, what do we have on the entire market? From all I know, it's one single device, namely the Mooer Ocean Machine.
And it's absolutely not the same as using any other MFX device (such as the HX Stomp), in some cases dedicated knobs are just great to have (*check* for the Ocean Machine, which is a joy to program on the unit, compared to the Stomp).
Strymon should really do a combined Timeline/BigSky monster (and add TCs Mash functionality). I'd order it today. But for obvious reasons (cannibalizing their own products, which they kind of do already anyway) that will never happen.
 
It kinda blows my mind that there isn't very much out there that competes with the Big Sky and Timeline even after a decade!
Source Audio Ventris and Nemesis are probably the closest competitors. I don't love how they operate from their front panels, to me the "flick a switch to program each side" is perhaps one of the worst ideas because it means your knobs are almost never pointing at the right thing. Strymon's "current preset or knobs position" behavior is more manageable.

I never got the Stryfecta because I felt they had a lot of stuff I didn't care about and they were so old that I expected they would be replaced "any day now", which of course hasn't happened.
 
Source Audio Ventris and Nemesis are probably the closest competitors. I don't love how they operate from their front panels, to me the "flick a switch to program each side" is perhaps one of the worst ideas because it means your knobs are almost never pointing at the right thing. Strymon's "current preset or knobs position" behavior is more manageable.

I never got the Stryfecta because I felt they had a lot of stuff I didn't care about and they were so old that I expected they would be replaced "any day now", which of course hasn't happened.
The Ventris is genuinely one of the best reverbs on the market, that's why I did that almost 2 hour video on it 5 years ago or so! Bloody hell time flies. I love the Nemesis too.

But where the Source Audio stuff slightly falls down is usability, and pro features. Like.... switching presets on the Ventris and Nemesis has so many quirks and annoyances that it just isn't worth doing.

I bet if they went over to ARM chips, they'd have more horsepower to do things like that at the same sort of market cost.
 
Orry…

As cool as it may be with an all out mfx pedalboard, with only programmable multi function pedals with presets and midi and stuff.

Consider the tactical and responsive operations of traditional pedals. They’re really nothing that kills the sudden burst of spontaneity like these mfx units do. You’ve spend hundreds of hours setting up presets and ready to go sounds.

But heck… I do think that being creative and spontaneous, being inspired is easier with pedals that has only a few knobs on them.

So imo a good idea is to mix it up, just to get away from the “playing presets” thing once in a while.
 
Orry…

As cool as it may be with an all out mfx pedalboard, with only programmable multi function pedals with presets and midi and stuff.

Consider the tactical and responsive operations of traditional pedals. They’re really nothing that kills the sudden burst of spontaneity like these mfx units do. You’ve spend hundreds of hours setting up presets and ready to go sounds.

But heck… I do think that being creative and spontaneous, being inspired is easier with pedals that has only a few knobs on them.

So imo a good idea is to mix it up, just to get away from the “playing presets” thing once in a while.
That's why I have my Strymon board. I'm trying to have it all!

I totally agree about spontaneous creativity. I can quickly just turn a few knobs on multiple pedals and arrive at a new sound, whereas doing that on Axe-Edit feels more like programming than experimenting. Part of this is the limitations on what you can do in software editors and the clunkiness of onboard UIs until they all move to touchscreen systems.

The "one block at a time" behavior of Fractal, Helix etc editors means that you can't easily experiment with the relation of your amp vs drive block settings etc. I have multiple high res screens here where I'd love to be able to pin different blocks for quick "drag a knob with a mouse" editing (or ideally "use a MIDI knob controller" editing...) instead of this "pick a block, adjust a thing, pick a block, adjust a thing" back and forth.

I know that pretty much every sound I can come up with my pedals, the Axe-Fx 3 can do too. But I use my Strymon board basically as an experimentation platform and then sometimes try to replicate say a fun multitap delay I came up with on the Volante, and spend 3x more time doing it on Fractal because it's a less curated system favoring having more adjustable things over ease of use.
 
means that you can't easily experiment with the relation of your amp vs drive block settings

Having this back on my hybrid board turned out to be *the* single most biggest relief, especially when recording. It's all done well with the Helix, but you stil need to flip between blocks *all* the time. And it doesn't matter whether you're editing on the hardware or use the editor, block flipping can't be avoided.
So far, there's been three modeler/MFX types getting this aspect at least kind of right: Boss with their MS-series, Line 6 with their M9 and M13 and Zoom with their G3-and-up series, with Zoom being pretty much the clear winner.
 
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