Pedalboard Knob Golf

J

jcpst

Well-known member
There’s something I find satisfying about reducing the total number of knobs on my pedalboard. It’s not that I don’t like a pedal packed with pots. Those are fun. But that’s not what this thread is about.

I know others have this condition. Share your knob reduction experiences and ideas. I’ll start:

The Green Ringer is a shoe-in. No knobs! I recently made a Doomstick and swapped out the fuzz on my board with it. One knob! Ah ah ah…

I have the Duo-Phase on my board right now. The thing is awesome. But I could get down to one knob with the Phase 90.

The logical endgame to this would be to have trimmers or fixed resistor values in place of all the pots. But I don’t think I would take it all the way there.

Switches don’t bother me though. They are discrete values, and it’s simple to change between states.
 
It’s very appealing to me, until I go through a phase of wanting to experiment. I’ve thought about replacing knobs with two or three throw switches pretty seriously though. A lot of my pedals have little marks around some knobs, usually two or three place markers, that are “sweet spots” for me. On some drives, it could even be two pole switches, with gain and volume on the poles, since my set positions often involve a tweak of both.

But generally with rate knobs, I vary those for a given song, and tone type controls seem to get adjusted either by what guitar I’m using or the barometric pressure (ie, at random).
 
I got into this thing because I wanted to do more, not less. What happens when you try your knobless pedals with a new guitar or amp or before or after something new and you have to tweak it a bit. Whoops! no knobs. Sounds lame.
 
Aentons said:
What happens when you try your knobless pedals with a new guitar or amp or before or after something new and you have to tweak it a bit. Whoops! no knobs. Sounds lame.
Click to expand...
jcpst said:
It’s not that I don’t like a pedal packed with pots. Those are fun. But that’s not what this thread is about.
Click to expand...
jcpst said:
The logical endgame to this would be to have trimmers or fixed resistor values in place of all the pots. But I don’t think I would take it all the way there.
Click to expand...
🤷‍♂️
 
Big Monk said:
As a reformed “make everything an external control” guy, I always live by the mantra of “Do I need this?”

Less is generally better.

Less knobs, less switches, less trimmers, etc.
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Well, I mean, you don’t have to do it, you just have to be able to do it. 😁
 
I think they both have their place. Excessive tweak-ability is really fun.

I think I’m keeping the duo-phase on the board for now. It’s just too good. I have it plugged into two channels of my loop switcher. So I can flip the order, or run them parallel.
 
I'm trying to reform.

I think it was Joe Gore that started me down that path. Nostradoomus has been influential, too.

For example, I did get two (2) Brutalist Jr PCBs early on when that was pretty much the only thing available from GCI:
one PCB for an all (external) mod-cons (ALL suggestions in the build doc, pretty much)...

🕛 VOL🕛 LOUD🕛 DIST
🕛 RESPONSE🕛 HPF🕛 PRESENCE
🕛 BASS🕛 TREBLE🕛 FOCUS
📍 BASS-Q sw📍 GAIN sw📍 CLIP sw (maybe a rotary sw)

Yeah. Nine (9) knobs, three switches and two stompers — one for bypass and the other for a two-knob jobbie on the gain or a starve or a boost or...


and ...


the other for a minimalist build once I sorted out what I liked from the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink build.
Maybe 2-3 knobs, or one knob and a few switches...



Let's face it though...

Nothing worse than having a hamstrung ability to change something, but only if you unplug the pedal, rip it off your board, undo 4 screws, take the backing-plate off, plug it back in to power with the back off, ask band-mates to continue rehearsing while you tweak setting on the internal trimmers and dip-switches, repeat request to band-mates to run through the song again, further tweaking, put the lid back on, add the four screws but drop one, search and find it, unplug the pedal to reinsert it into the pedalboard's signal chain, plug it all back in then request the band run through the song yet again and pray that the settings will be good enough for the upcoming gig with a much larger room, different humidity and barometric pressure and different PA and different once again after soundcheck and the patrons start arriving only to find you don't have enough mids to cut through the new atmospheric conditions on the gig and unable to turn up the mids mid-song — if only you'd built it with the mids-adjustment externally located for a quick on the fly adjustment, but no, your signal just drowns beneath the mix, not even the club's super-supportive sound-engineer can save you...
 
I can feel that description @Feral Feline - just from building pedals that need biasing and deciding you need to make adjustments after screwing the lid on.

Perhaps another way of thinking of it is reframing the pedalboard as part of the instrument. I hold the perspective that an electric guitar amp is part of the instrument. If there’s something in-between the two parts, why wouldn’t that be part of the instrument too? What I’m getting at is, maybe it’s all about being just as fluent at your pedalboard as you are your instrument. And if it’s a large pedalboard, be prepared to have a strong mental model of all the interactions of your controls, both intra-pedal and inter-pedal.

So then it becomes a question of what controls are essential, and what should have just been a tonal decision made in the circuit.
 
I agree, you play the pedalboard and the amp just as much as the instrument ( be it guitar, bass, B3, rhodes etc) — the entire signal chain as one big instrument.

I knew an Australian rockabilly guitarist in HK who I overheard another friend say he really had his pedalboard sorted. At the time, I didn't know enough to understand what a huge complement my friend had given the Aussie and indeed looking back, the Aussie was very meticulous about his pedal-settings and indeed had his small board dialled in to a T, or a "D" I guess. Sparkly cleans, crisp and spanky ODs, and a perfect slap-back echo and tremolo that was deep-throbbing yet didn't make the guitar disappear when engaged... He moved back to Australia before I got a change to play/jam with him, alas.
 
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