New Pedal Board

My old pedal board seemed cool when I made it but several shortcomings made themselves known. When I added a Digitech Vocalist Live 4 to my rig, it became too small. The Live 4 needs to be in the guitar signal chain to get it's reference for figuring out harmonies, so it was becoming a pain to plug it in and unplug it every time. I decided that a new board would not have any hard to reach cavities and I wanted to figure out a way to attach devices without Velcro or anything that would get sticky when it gets hot. I really liked a lot about the Pedal Train products that are available, but the only unit they have big enough to hold what I need is a really big square and I needed more of a wide, shallow rectangle. One could use two of their smaller units end to end, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having everything stay pre-wired unless one welded those two units together. If I had a mig welder I probably would have done that, but not having a way to weld aluminum, I had to think of something else.

I spotted a leftover piece of 12" wire shelving in the garage. I got to thinking this would be nice and light if it could be made stiff enough. Also the wires would make it easy to zip tie things to it. A piece of 1x4 across the font and a piece of 1x2 across the back provide the stiffness, make a nice angle, and provide room underneath. I ground and wire-wheeled the ends of the cross wires so they wouldn't catch on anything. I plan on getting some kind of small keyboard case to haul this around. A case for a 61 key should leave a foot or so at the end for coils of cables and there may be room for a few stands as well.

It's tempting to put too much stuff on a pedal board. But it doesn't take too many cycles of load in/set up/strike/load out to make you want to strip everything down to no more than what you absolutely need and use all the time. Also for me, I became fanatical about weight. At the same time, one wants to find ways to make the set and strike as simple as possible with as many things staying pre-wired as possible. This is the setup I've been using lately. Everything is zip tied in place. No Velcro! No sticky!!

With only the 1x4 in front, the pedals felt a little spongy. A 1x2 across the back stiffened it right up and raised the pedals up a pleasing amount.

Grinding a bit off 2 sides of these 1" washers made them fit down into the openings.

A couple extra washers in front of the 1x4 made for a gap big enough to get a zip tie around the front cross wire.

I got an idea from Pedal Train's design. By raising the front it made room underneath for a power supply, or in my case, the original wall worts on a power strip.

I had a few of these brackets in the garage left over from some project or another. I used them to fasten the 1x2 and also as anchor points for zip ties to hold the wall worts in place.

Configuration 2. After a bit of test driving, I realized I needed to put the most used buttons closest to the front. Also got to messing with the drum machine for the first time in a long time and I think I might try to start incorporating it more after all.