Guitar pedals were one of the catalysts for me getting into music technology. Through listening to various bands who created these non-guitar-like sounds I became fascinated in the guitar more as a vehicle for making weird noises rather than just being a traditional instrument.

Around this time I joined up to GuitarGeek (now part of Guitar.com) and starting collecting various oddities from eBay and second hand stores. I’ve always relied on pedals even when not playing guitar, spending years in a band playing keyboard made me seek out pedals to work with Rhodes sounds and create pseudo synth tones.

Years later I’ve got the pedals doing what I want them to. I now don’t play live at all and if I were to I’d probably build a far smaller portable pedalboard. The boards below are strictly for studio usage and would be hugely impractical to gig with.

So far I know I’m the only person who I’ve seen with kind of setup, probably due to the aforementioned hassle of transporting and patching such a monster but also it was a pain in the ass putting together.

Huge props go to Greg Michalik from Guitar Aid in London who built this for me exactly to my specifications even thought it would have been much simpler to cut corners. For anyone in the London/South East area I would highly recommend him, not just for guitars and amps but I’ve taken all sorts there, tape echoes, vocoders, keyboards, analog and digital synths, the lot.

Parallel Pedalboard

My pedal collection is a mixture of old and new, digital and analog, traditional and non traditional. Naturally some pedals sound great in certain combinations and some less so. When recording on my own, with clients or friends I always found the plugging in of pedals a real time-sapping thing. Finding the right AC adapter, finding a cable long enough etc.

For some people, you might have a pedalboard with a single configuration and going in on one side and out the other is fine. This is a series circuit, signal flows from one side to the other. But what’s bad about this is if you’re just using one pedal right in the middle of the chain, without unplugging it you have to run through the whole board, picking up hiss and noise along the way.

Also changing the signal path can be cumbersome. This is why I wanted to build my parallel (semi) modular board. Every pedal would be plugged into a collection of cable snakes and have an insert point on a couple of patch bays.

Impedance Issues

I did some research and whilst this is common with rack equipment and other studio odds and sods I couldn’t see it done anywhere with pedals. Pedals are of course at instrument level (not line) so some considerations had to be taken with that. I bought two Radial ProRMP Reampers to convert line level signals into something a guitar pedal might accept.

This means I could run drum loops, synths, guitars or vocals from Live/Logic into the pedals without the signal being too hot. On the way out of the pedals, the signal runs either into a DI or instrument level input on my soundcard to convert it back to line level.

Let’s have a look at the boards:

Board #1

This is the smaller of the two boards and contains mostly just distortion pedals. I’ve always loved distortion and the earth shatteringly different sounds you can get from running different level signals into a distortion. Placing it a filter before or after it can radically change the sound and it’s so versatile too.

From top left to bottom right:

Board #2

This is the bigger of the two boards and contains most everything else. There’s a few stereo pedals here, which is great for usage with a DAW. Also is some older pedals, some synth pedals, modulations and delays.

From top left to bottom right:

There’s a few bits that have been missed out here, some Alesis ModFX, a Heil Talkbox, the odd multi-FX unit and probably some pedals that have died but not yet been chucked, on the hope that they can be resurrected, but largely that’s it. I’ve also recently inherited another two boss compacts from I am Alice, a flanger and overdrive, but I’ve not had the chance to road test them yet!

I find this setup hugely useful for studio use for of course that’s as far as it can go. Apart from being incredibly heavy it’s not practical patching pedals live, so it’s very unlikely they’ll see more outside of these four walls.

Having this (as far as I can tell) uniquely patched system means I can change the order, routing, modulation and signal flow with ease. No more hunting around for cables, power supplies and spending time matching impedance. Let me know what you think!