Need ideas for an audition spot on my board

[swelchy]

Have some room on my pedalboard and have all my wiring cinched up tight on the bottom. Looks like I have room for several more pedals and I want to keep two spots open for auditions…. Mostly drives that I would run I. Front of the chain…. Should I place them just wherever I can fit them and wire some random Box with jacks and a switch to route that pedal in front of all the others?

 

[swelchy]

 

[Joben Magooch]

I have made a couple of "audition boxes" for this purpose. Goodwood, Vertex, etc make them (and more full-featured ones generally) but they are really pretty simple devices. At the heart of it, it's just an input jack connected to two switched "send/return" jacks that then connect to your output. I don't know what your signal chain is, but for instance if you wanted to put a "audition" spot in between your Carbon Copy and Specular Tempus you'd go:

- Out from Carbon Copy to Audition Box "In"
- Audition box "Send" to trial pedal input
- Trial pedal output to Audition box "return"
- Audition box "Out" to Specular Tempus input

And so anything you put in the send/return loop would be inserted in between your carbon copy and specular tempus, but since it's switched jacks if you unplug your trial/testing pedal from the audition loop then it would route directly from the carbon copy out to specular tempus in.

You could do it with a footswitch too, but I like having switched jacks as it's just one less component to buy and one less point of failure. Plus with no switch sticking out on top you can keep the entire top of the pedal open to just place your trial/tester pedal on top of. You could always put a toggle on the side too I guess but that's taking up space as well. So yea, I like just using two switched jacks.

Here's a simple layout for it from Vertex (i know...). You can disregard the top and bottom pair of jacks, it's just going to be the four middle ones for the "audition" portion.

I don't know exactly how small you could get it, probably a 1590G if you wanted? I typically put in 1590B.

 

[Feral Feline]

Really digging Joben's idea of the patch-point box also being a pedal-riser for the demo pedals.



There was a guy on TalkBass who had a few 1590A "insertion-points" placed around his board.
Can't find pics of it, twas so long ago.

The jacks were normalised, so if nothing was plugged in, the signal flowed uninterupted.

He could:
A) Plug in Demo pedals before after various sections of his chain (without them on his board, but if you've got space...);
B) Bypass a section if one of that section's pedals went down (the show must go on, and then trouble-shoot after the gig).

He placed ALL the jacks on the face of the 1590A, for ease of use, instead of on the sides as this commercial pedal does:

I've been meaning to make a few of these insertion-point 1590As (all face-jacks). Good reminder.
Also need to build a Bored Brain "Terminal" clone.

I had a few posts about this topic over on TB, might be worth checking out.


Unfortunately, my current patchbay became too big to manage on my own, so I hired some staffers to handle it all...

 

[Feral Feline]

Oh, more vaguely related ideas from my TB daze.

 

[swelchy]

I have made a couple of "audition boxes" for this purpose. Goodwood, Vertex, etc make them (and more full-featured ones generally) but they are really pretty simple devices. At the heart of it, it's just an input jack connected to two switched "send/return" jacks that then connect to your output. I don't know what your signal chain is, but for instance if you wanted to put a "audition" spot in between your Carbon Copy and Specular Tempus you'd go:

- Out from Carbon Copy to Audition Box "In"
- Audition box "Send" to trial pedal input
- Trial pedal output to Audition box "return"
- Audition box "Out" to Specular Tempus input

And so anything you put in the send/return loop would be inserted in between your carbon copy and specular tempus, but since it's switched jacks if you unplug your trial/testing pedal from the audition loop then it would route directly from the carbon copy out to specular tempus in.

You could do it with a footswitch too, but I like having switched jacks as it's just one less component to buy and one less point of failure. Plus with no switch sticking out on top you can keep the entire top of the pedal open to just place your trial/tester pedal on top of. You could always put a toggle on the side too I guess but that's taking up space as well. So yea, I like just using two switched jacks.

Here's a simple layout for it from Vertex (i know...). You can disregard the top and bottom pair of jacks, it's just going to be the four middle ones for the "audition" portion.

I don't know exactly how small you could get it, probably a 1590G if you wanted? I typically put in 1590B.

This sounds like a good idea! I'm thinking of two places..... first spot on the board before the tuner... because I use my tuner as input buffer and the other spot before my HX stomp.. because I'll mostly have drives to audition....