Joben's 2022 Pedalboard Build Odyssey (Pic heavy and probably excessively wordy)

[Joben Magooch]

2022 has been a bit of an adventure for me. It's about to come to a close and I think (with the exception of one or two small tweaks to be mentioned later) my gear situation should be relatively wrapped up for now, so I thought it might be fun to walk back through and review.

So I don't remember if I ever posted about it or not but I was pretty well out of commission to start the year. I had a surgical procedure done the first week of January which ended up having some major complications that kept me in the ICU for a week and then the step-down unit for a week further before finally getting sent home. Then I was out of work recovering until March and honestly didn't really feel back to "normal" until like late April, early May. I pretty much didn't touch any gear at all during this period, so this story more or less starts around the middle of the year. Here's how things looked around then:


You can't really see it too well, but there's a little "interface" box beneath the DI in the top-right corner. It's completely passive, more or less just a glorified patch bay - guitar goes in, out the other side to pedals. "Dry" pedals go to a send/return switched loop and then back out to "wet" pedals. Last pedal in chain then returns to the patch box and here it's connected to an SGI box for an amp offstage. I think it was a Morgan AC20 in this.
First in line then is my trusty Mooer Yellow Comp. It's a clone of the Diamond Comp; honestly at this point I think it's my longest-standing pedal I've got. I love it and doubt it will ever leave. It's always on.
From there we go to the PedalPCB Minidrive. The Fulldrive has always been one of my favorite takes on the TS-circuit and this has been around for me for quite some time too. I think it might have been my first PPCB build actually. Out to the Protein Blue; I really like Bluesbreakers as well and this is one of my favorite versions I've tried.
Then it's to the HX stomp. At the time I had the stomp set up with two basic patches - one for an all-in-one with amp sims and all and another for use with a real amp, which is what's happening here. So practically speaking it's being used for Delay, modulation, and the Bigsky is in its send/return loop for control.
The Stomp and Bigsky are being controlled here by the Morningstar MC6 (the little box to the right is an additional expansion footswitch for it). I have tried quite a few midi controllers and in my estimation Morningstar makes the very best out there.
All powered by the small but mighty Truetone CS7 - Stomp, Bigsky, and all.

But, I often had issues with the FX loop in the stomp and it never seemed to play just right with my delays and reverbs. I don't love the stomp's delays either, so shortly after I went back to the trusty Timeline. I've owned probably half a dozen Timelines (and Bigskys, for that matter) at this point and pretty much every time I tell myself "I don't need this" or "it's more delay than I can use" or "I only use one or two settings anyways" and sell it...then inevitably come back to it. It's stayed about 6 months now so hopefully it just sticks for good. I do find myself missing my El Cap, though...



Not much else has changed here; I've installed a riser on the pedalboard which has both the Stomp and Bigsky on it. My little Yellow comp and CS7 are hidden underneath. In the past I have been able to power all of this off of a CS7 as well, but for some reason this particular timeline is much more picky about how it gets its power. It really seems to want to just use its own dedicated PSU, so that's hiding under the riser as well. Oh, and you can see the Mosky Black Rat added. It's a really nice little Rat clone, thru-hole, LM308 and everything. Was like 25 bucks. Hard to beat.

I really like a lot about the flat board style. I like the aesthetic and it's nice to get those really neat and organized cable runs. But this one was getting a bit full and making it hard to keep clean and organized. I had started running a lot in stereo too which doubles half my cables so I decided at this point I'd build an angled board that would allow me to keep my cables hidden underneath. It's at this point that things got a bit messy...

I am a decent woodworker in all honesty. Most of our furniture around the house was built by me and I've done more cabinets and vanities and islands than I care to count. I'm not an absolute master and I don't make a living off of it but I say all that just to clarify that I'm not a total noob who doesn't know which end of a hammer to hold.

It may sound a little weird but the basis for my build-design was actually working off of a case I already had. Probably seems backwards. I have a nice Pelican-type case that's waterproof and wheeled and it's almost an exact fit for a Temple Audio Trio 21 board (I had one a while back but got tired of the plates and found it was a bit too low of an angle), so about 21x16". That's the size of the flat board(s) above too, which also used that same case. I quite like this size and really like having a case that seems bomb-proof and wanted to be able to continue with it.

So the plan was to do a wooden angled frame with a hinged top that would allow me to flip up and route the cables as needed as well as store my power supplies underneath. At the same time, I was wanting to add some modulation on its own rather than relying on the Stomp for this; I wanted to use the stomp just for amps as this made signal routing easier (as above I had some issues with the Stomp FX loop so didn't want to use it. And without using the loop it meant either running delay and reverb post-amp which I don't like, or modulation post delay/reverb which was not the move either).

I suppose it is also worth mentioning at this point that I have a new ~3 month old in the picture here...in addition to my ~18 month old. So life is pretty hectic for me and I don't get a lot of shop time. This was pretty much all going to be done during spare time on my lunch breaks at work.

Plans were drafted up and I made a prototype out of some scrap plywood to make sure everything was fitting correctly. I have a dovetail jig for my router which I NEVER use because it's honestly more trouble than it's worth, but I thought it'd be nice to get some nice hardwood and do dovetail joints. I had it all dialed in on scrap and it was fitting quite nicely. I wanted to do one final test on scrap to make sure it was 100% perfect...For reasons unknown to me to this day, the height-adjustment screw for the router straight up snapped mid-cut. The bit slammed into the jig-fingers, shredded a couple of them up, ruined my guide bushing, and the bit itself was totally mangled - bent and chipped and useless. Luckily I avoided injury myself, but my jig was more or less toast and I hated the d*mn thing already so I just pitched it all and washed my hands of it and moved on. Total freak thing; I would understand if I hadn't adequately tightened it down or didn't have my jig set right but everything was good...it just snapped on its own, lol.

So instead of messing with dovetails I figured a simple box joint would still look nice. I made up a jig for my table saw with a dado stack and it was also cutting quite nicely. I made another scrap prototype, and this time also got a piece of birch ply for my top laid out with some slots cut on the router table.



As you can see there's a bit of burning but no matter. The whole top is getting painted so it won't be visible. I was honestly really happy with this piece. It's a perfect fit for the frame and the slots came out really clean overall. They were going to work great....

So I finished up with my prototypes and went ahead and started with my "good" wood. It's nothing too fancy, just some red oak I had laying around. Here's the frame cut and getting glued up:



And it was shortly after this that disaster struck again, but we'll save that for part two...

 

[Joben Magooch]

PART TWO!

I got the oak frame assembled and it's coming along great. The edges are rounded over, the top is installed and it fits perfect. Hinges up and down really nicely and looks pretty "pro" if I do say so myself. I cut a rabbet into the bottom to install a 1/2" panel in the bottom to mount my power supplies and feet on. I'll glue it in once the rest is done. I got a power-inlet jack as well as a bunch of D-panel inserts for various purposes. The project had grown a little bit and I kept finding things to add....but the plan was to have D-panel jacks for Guitar Input, USB input (HX Stomp), USB 2 Input (MC6), USB Power Out (charging, etc), Left Output, Right Output, Headphone Output, and three expression inputs - two to the MC6 for expansion footswitches and one to a line 6 M9 (Line 6 EX1 expression pedal). I had a small flatboard assembled that would house the three expression pedals and they could be added in with a small cable loom as needed or left behind entirely. It was looking pretty sweet.

So I'm going to make the cutouts for the D-panel inserts, it's pretty much the last step before final assembly and finishing. I have a template made out of 1/4" MDF that's attached to the side panels and I've already hogged out the excess, now just using a flush-cut router bit to trim to the exact dimension. The bit's bearing rides along the template and the cutting edge follows exactly to match. I don't know if I had my bit speed too fast or what (I don't think so, but it's all I can think of...) but somehow in another strange and unfortunate twist the bearing itself began cutting into the template and before I knew it it had made a huge gouge into the side panel. These were fairly precise cutouts and frankly it was beyond salvaging. It had been a month's worth of 20-spare-minutes-on-lunch to get to this point and I was just so defeated. In what I'm sure was a very pathetic moment to anyone who happened to be walking by my garage I quite literally had tears of frustration coming out as I threw my botched oak frame into the floor and shattered it.

I took a break for a few days at this point.

 

[Joben Magooch]

Part Three!

As fate would have it I had a gig coming up in just a few days and my pedalboard was literally in pieces and totally disassembled otherwise. I was about to fly across the country and really needed to put something together. I had an old PT-Pro with soft case and that was the best I could figure up. I made up some plans and was honestly quite intrigued by the whole idea and began putting it together. I added a birch ply top for more pedal space, and some nice looking wooden side panels which gave me a bit more height for cabling underneath.



I even fabbed up some brackets for my D-panel jacks. I randomly had some server hardware lying around that was nearly a perfect fit for the back edge of the pedaltrain platform. D-panels use approximately a 15/16" bit which is not super common. 7/8" is a bit too small but 1" will have some gaps in my experience. I used a 7/8" bit and carefully filed away until they fit nice and snug with no gaps showing. I got these cool label plates from Redco and it was looking pretty nice. They were initially meant to be stacked three on top of three, so that's why some of the labels are on top and some are on bottom.



I got everything wired up, all my pedals loaded on, and flew across the country for a weekend. It arrived safely, no issues at all, and sounded great honestly.



It's not pictured here, but a Line 6 EX-1 Expression Pedal went in the space directly to the left of the EBVP, too.
Only problem is...as assembled this bad boy clocked in around 60lbs. The Pedaltrain soft-case is just a shoulder-strap type bag and boy does 60lbs on one shoulder strap wear on you quickly. I lugged this around for a month before deciding I was sick of it and began again looking for solutions for a lighter board that could fit in my wheeled case. Ultimately it was at this point that I pretty well went back to my original plan of a 21x16 hinged top board....

 

[Joben Magooch]

Part Four!

But truthfully I was pretty sick at this point of tearing up good wood or trying to make cheap wood look nice, so I decided I'd just use cheap wood and simply hide any faults.
I whipped up a frame out of some decent quality 3/4" plywood, just simple butt joints with screws and dowels to hide the screws. Ugly, but sturdy. I bought some "caramel" colored tolex and wrapped the whole thing in it.

This reminded me that I kind of hate working with tolex and spray adhesive but I took my time and got a decent result. I added some amp corners to hide where there were some slight imperfections, and I think it turned out pretty decent honestly. I was able to repurpose the top surface I'd previously made and it still is quite nice to me.



Don't mind the bare copper wires sticking out of the D-panel jacks on the left-hand side. They'll get cleaned up and hardwired in soon...



Here you can see how some of the power is routed on the inside as well as some of the stuff going to the top. It's not really finished at this point, so not as neat as intended, but you get the idea. I used a Powercon D-panel for power this time which goes into a custom made split cable - one side feeds the CS7 and another goes to an outlet tap which has three standalone PSUs which I'm using for each of the big box Strymon's. There's some cleats for the top, as well as some hinge catches to keep it shut (although the weight generally does that), and the whole interior was painted flat black as well, save for the hinges. D-panel jacks for Input, L Out, R Out, and Headphone out are still in place.

I went a bit overboard with the labels, maybe. Each Power cable is labeled with the voltage and what it's going to, as well as the PSU(s) itself. You may also notice that all my patch cables are labeled, too. For instance, the cable connecting my Timeline to my Bigsky would have "TIMELINE L OUT" on one end and "BIGSKY L IN" on the other, paired with "TIMELINE R OUT" to "BIGSKY R IN". And so on...you get the idea. Perhaps a bit excessive but it keeps everything very organized and there's no question if stuff is connected properly or such.

Of course this is just a mild headache should something get swapped out as I've then gotta peel off and re-label my cable and PSU.

And here you can see where things are at as they stand! It's mostly finished at this point. The board itself is done. I'll explain my pedal choices and how I got there in a post to follow.


Do ignore the half-strung Jazzmaster in the corner...and the mismatched knobs on the shameless DRV copy.