I'd like to share a brain dump for another one of my projects in my time off from this site. I had wanted a custom pedalboard for a while now, since selling the Pedaltrain that I had. There are quite a few custom builders out there who do this sort of thing these days, but given that I wanted to learn and pick up a lot of the required skills, I decided to go the DIY route.
Planning
We shall start with the requirements. In actual fact there is nothing really complicated to most pedalboard designs. When you start looking into the detail you may find little challenges here and there with the build process however from a planning point of view, IMO all you really need to be concerned about are:
Size
Features
Size
This is a relatively easy decision, but I guess depending on your personality it can be quite pain inducing. I went through a bit of that in the early stages when I was trying to work out not only how much space I needed for the pedals that I had, but how much space I needed for the pedals that I was going to own.
In the end, I believe a certain amount of future-proofing is great but as with most tinkering guitarists, our gear changes pretty frequently. So it is quite impossible to predict what you will be needing 2 months down the line after that late night drunken eBay purchase. For me, I settled on working from what I thought would be the relatively constant modules of my setup. That was:
Switcher: I am very happy with the ES-8 for now and the benefits of having it in the setup far outweigh the downsides, for me. It would end up being the focal point of the whole board - meaning that I would arrange my pedals around it so that the ones that I used the most often would have the shortest patch cabling to/from the ES-8.
Power: I had planned to mount the VL 4x4 under the board, with room for expansion. I am excited by the new digital pedals coming out (i.e. Source Audio ones), and I do know that they require more power and I preferably want to isolate them. So that means I will need another option for powering them in the future, if I end up getting those pedals.
Other than that, I knew that I would have a section each for Gain, Fuzz, Modulation, EQ, Compression, Delay and Reverb. And I would need some space for some sort of expression pedal and my volume pedal. I knew that the gain pedals would most likely be swapped out the most often, so I needed it to have enough room.
So my advice would be: If you do have pedals that are unchanging in your signal chain, or somewhat of a focal point such as a switcher, then start with that and expand out. Figure out what you will need and leave yourself some room for expansion. Also don't forget to leave room for patch cables and connectors.
A resource that was handy for the planning in this stage was Pedalboard Planner. This site has a huge range of pedals all sized correctly for you to add on Pedaltrain boards.
I settled for a pedalboard footprint of 900mm x 450mm. I proceeded to size the pedal board to those dimensions and did a dry run to see if all the pedals I wanted on there would fit. Once the decision was settled on, it's time to move on with the build.
Features
Even though pedalboards are relatively simple pieces of equipment, there are many features out there offered by builders that can offer challenges to the DIY builder.
You may want to have a think about portability - some builders offers a cover/case that the pedalboard can be snapped on to and then carried around like a suitcase. This wasn't something that I needed, so I cannot comment much on the subject. But if you need that sorta thing I would say that your build process just went up a couple of notches in complexity. Not to mention you will need additional hardware.
My requirements were more simple. I required a power jack in that would connect to my VL 4x4 via an IEC C14 male plug (or "kettle plug" as it is commonly known around these parts). I would essentially just need to wire up an extension cord that would be underneath the board. There are other features that you can add, such as an on/off switch that would kill the power but I decided not to implement that.
I also required 2 x Instrument Inputs and 2 x Outputs since the ES-8 has 2 ins and 2 outs. And that was it as far as ins and outs; those were the extent of the holes that I would have to drill through the pedalboard frame: 1 for power in, 4 for the 1/4" plugs needed for the inputs/outputs.
For the design, I wanted something that was slanted so that I had good access to the pedals and also had room in the back to mount units like the VL 4x4.
Inspiration
I just wanted to give proper credit to where I got the inspiration for most aspects of the design that I settled on:
Brad from Schuurs Fine Timbre Products (click to open new page), runs a business that creates custom pedalboards among other things. He also runs a blog on his website and a Facebook page where he goes through some of the details on how he constructs things. He even posts plans for his builds at times.
He is really generous with his knowledge and it looks like he is producing some truly impressive looking products, Australian made as well. In his blog posts you can see how meticulous he is with his build process and you can see from his workshop what a serious operation it is.
Anyway I don't know if anyone reads this stuff but if I can encourage some traffic his way that would be great.
I also gleaned some inspiration from Salvage Custom pedalboards. I don't know much about them other than the fact that they make some cool looking pedalboards and really know how to take great photos of them!
In the coming posts I will go through the build process and hopefully list out all the problems/solutions that I encountered. Stay tuned.
