What a (not) great time to be a guitarist (who wants to build a pedalboard)!

JiveTurkey

JiveTurkey

Goatlord
TGF Recording Artist
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Thinking about building a small :farley board


Tons of great options on really every category. As long as you don't mind spending insane amounts of money. Yeah; I could get a bunch of Donner minis for $47 a pop. But I don't want the cheap :poop:

This is why modelers always rise to the top. Because good enough is an easier to swallow pill than spending $1200 for 4 pedals that are the best.
 
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jellodog said:
What pedals are you looking to acquire @JiveTurkey ?

Can we see a shopping list of minimum requirements for this new board?
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I'm just window shopping right now.

I want a wah, tuner and some OD choices initially. With pedal power. I will probably grab a Maverick mini (fairly cheap), polytune pedal but the OD side is wide open. Probably go TruTone for pedal power. None of these options are botique by any means but UGH.
 
JiveTurkey said:
I'm just window shopping right now.

I want a wah, tuner and some OD choices initially. With pedal power. I will probably grab a Maverick mini (fairly cheap), polytune pedal but the OD side is wide open. Probably go TruTone for pedal power. None of these options are botique by any means but UGH.
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Cool.

Apart from general insterest in your journey, I was wondering if there was anything in my dwindling personal cache of pedals earmarked for sale that were also on your list. Sold all my ODs except the one I'm using though.
 
Also; @the swede ; what's cool is I can alllllllllllllllllmost make 8 blocks work even if I added an OD block. If they could squeeze just a little more juice out of it and not require sends and returns to take up processing power; that would be very nice!
 
JiveTurkey said:
Also; @the swede ; what's cool is I can alllllllllllllllllmost make 8 blocks work even if I added an OD block. If they could squeeze just a little more juice out of it and not require sends and returns to take up processing power; that would be very nice!
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I agree! I like having 2-3 pedals with the stomp keeping things within the Metro 16 size, and the FX block is an annoyance... hate it.
 
JiveTurkey said:
Thinking about building a small :farley board


Tons of great options on really every category. As long as you don't mind spending insane amounts of money. Yeah; I could get a bunch of Donner minis for $47 a pop. But I don't want the cheap :poop:

This is why modelers always rise to the top. Because good enough is an easier to swallow pill than spending $1200 for 4 pedals that are the best.
Click to expand...

Some of the cheapies can sound good. The problems I have with most of the cheapies are very loud "pops' when engaging and/or very noisy power. I mean I can understand something like an OD pedal making a pop but not a chorus or phaser. The way around that is something like a Joyo PXL Pro or something but is it worth it? I also thought using a battery with a USB 9v adapter cable would quiet down the noisy power but it didn't.
 
I could build a small board and be content keeping everything under $200 a piece. I have no problems with the Boss DD series for delays, which would be my biggest money suck if I weren't keeping it 'cheap'. Settling on drive pedals would be the tough part for me.
 
Coming around to @fretworn's point of view here.

Sorry for crashing Your thread JT, but...

Last night I spent a great deal of time replicating my Bella + pedalboard in the FM3 + the same real cab and now I've gotten _very_ close.

Turns out that some of the sweet fatness that I thought was coming from the Bella was really the Diamond comp all along! haha. Yes, I feel dumb now. Until now, I've not quite been able to get that sound with the FM3. I had attributed it to "real tooobz".

So I just needed to more carefully replicate the Diamond Comp in the FM3 and there was the sound that I kept going back to the real amp for, once sprinkled with a subtle kiss from a drive pedal to add a little more harmonic content to my cleanish tone.

In many ways, the FM3 digital signal chain is better because I am doing some sneaky stuff with an HPF to the compressor and a few other EQ tweaks here and there which improve clarity and tightness.

Dayum, it's nice to not to have to worry about patch cables and power supplies etc. I still don't know if I can really let go of my analog stuff though, as much as I've already wittled it down.

One option is a hybrid approach though, because the real Diamond + Drive pedal into the front of the FM3 also sounded great. Best of both worlds, perhaps 🤔
 
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It was interesting building a pedal board this summer! I had not had a real board since 1998 when my dad helped me make one out a piece of plywood and some paint/parts. We zip tied three Boss pedals onto a single board...Metal Zone, Super Chorus, and GE-7.

Building the board was expensive for what it was. I got the D'Addario expandable board which is really cool, mostly because the Pedaltrain boards were oddly sized. And I can add/remove a couple pedals as I need to. Then I had to spend another $170 on a good power supply (Voodoo Labs), so I could power everything up with no noise. Add in a few patch cables and a current doubler, and I'm around $300.

The pedals themselves are another rabbit hole...I spent dozens of hours reading about which delay or boost pedals to pick up and try. Then went to the store and tried everything and was even more confused. I like but don't love what I have now...and honestly kind of prefer the modeler effects most of the time. Really is nice to have all that stuff built into one unit that can handle all the routing, switching, parameters, etc.
 
Crash away everyone! I have grown to know I like flat boards vs. slanted PT style stuff. Boards are cashy as are power supplies. And I'm not doing the One Spot thing either, no matter how few pedals I actually have on the board :hmm

I will probably just stick with the GD modeler for now and suck it up. The OD pedal idea kind went in one brain cell and out the other just because I don't feel like futzing with it at this point.
 
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