Craig - EQ's June '07 Tech Bench Column

[Phil O'Keefe]

I just read your Tech Bench column in the current issue of EQ, and really enjoyed it. :phil:

 

Last year, I decided it was long past the time for me to build a couple of nice effects pedalboards. I'd managed to amass a pretty decent collection of cool stompboxes (due in part to the GAS the folks on HCEF gave me - thanks guys ), and thought it would be good to get them all organized.

 

After deciding on the arrangement of the boards (there's just too much for one board), the next questions were how to mount the pedals, how to power them, and what to use to wire them all up.

 

For mounting, it was really a question of "velcro or no velcro". I appreciate the way that velcro allows you to reposition / rearrange pedal order, but I don't care for the way it sometimes becomes loose when you don't want it to, and how it feels less than completely secure underfoot when stomping on a pedal, so I opted for the "bike chain links" approach. A quick trip to the local hardware store and $15 or so gave me a new bike chain and a chain repair tool. I used that to disassemble the bike chain, and used the individual links as brackets to mount / screw the pedals directly to the board. For pedals where the bike chain link "brackets" were not long enough, or ones where angled brackets were required, I either used a blowtorch to heat the chain links so I could bend them to the proper angle with pliers, or I cut and fashoned brackets from inexpensive metal pipe retainer brackets from the local hardware store.

 

For power, I decided to use one Visual Sound One Spot power supply per board, along with daisy chain power leads to go from pedal to pedal. I did have one extra supply per board (there's always that one pedal that needs a different polarity or voltage... ), but the One Spots handle everything else.

 

Then there was the wiring. I could have gone out and bought a bunch of good cable, some Switchcraft plugs and pulled out the Weller soldering station.... but I knew there were a few different companies making DIY solderless cable kits, and a lot of folks seemed to like them, so I decided to give the Planet Waves pedalboard kits a try; partially because they were available locally and I was impatient and eager to get started.

 

Since I have about 20 pedals, I purchased four of the kits. Each kit, as you mentioned in the article, comes with ten feet of wire and ten connectors, as well as the cable cutting tool. No soldering tools are required, just a small screwdriver. The other tool I found useful to have on hand was a good multimeter, set for continuity testing. That way, I could quickly test each cable as I made it and before I mounted everything to the board just to insure I had properly assembled them.

 

Measuring and cutting the cable was quite easy, as was applying the connectors - once I got the hang of it. The trick is to make certain you have a nice clean cut with no extra / messy wire strands at the cut, and that you've inserted the cable into the plug as far as it would go. At first, I was pushing it in until I felt resistance and then stopping. That resulted in a few cables that didn't pass audio, and I realized I wasn't pushing them in quite far enough. Once I started really pushing them in hard, and applying a slight (quarter turn) "twist" once they were in all the way, every cable worked on the first try.

 

I liked the speed and flexibility of the PW solderless cables. You get exactly the cable length you need, and you can make a cable in less time than it took me to type that last paragraph. And they sound great!

 

They're not the ultimate cable solution for the studio - if you need XLR's or balanced / TRS 1/4" cables, you're out of luck, so soldering skills are still important to have if you're a studio cat IMO... but for 1/4" TS (and RCA - I didn't know about those until I read the article!) cables, they really are a cool product. I just thought I'd take a moment to commend you on the article and offer my impressions of the product. It's good stuff IMO. :phil:

[steveg]

Phil,

 

Sounds really cool! Can you explain the bike chain thing, I am not getting a visual on how it attaches to the pedal exactly....

[Phil O'Keefe]

You can see a commercial version of the bike chain links here, and an old picture of my "dirt board" (there's been some new additions, and that shot was taken before I finished wiring everything) right here.

[Phil O'Keefe]

BTW, my current dirt board signal path is:

 

Modded Morley ABY switch - one side feeding a Boss TU-12 tuner, the other side into a BYOC Fuzz Face clone -> GCB-95 wah -> OLCircuits Sunkist Squeeze (Orange Squeezer clone) compressor -> HBE Germania boost -> Fulltone OCD (I pulled the TS-9 off the board) -> MAD DD30 -> HBE Power Screamer w/ fat boost -> Danelectro Fish & Chips EQ -> OLCircuits Chunky Cheddar (Lovetone Big Cheese fuzz clone) -> Boss PS-5 pitch shifter -> Lovetone Brown Source.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Bump for Steve.