Show your pedal boards here!

You know, for years my forum buddies from the other forums have asked "Just how do you get that killer DTR tone?" At first, I did the Van Halen voodoo jedi mind trick stuff, trying to throw them off course. After a while though, the requests became overbearing, as every clip I put up brought more and more and more requests for the recipe for that special DTR tone. Now that I've been here for a while, I guess it's safe to finally share this with you guys. I am forced to still keep one thing secret though. The "invisible-silent" cables linking the top row of pedals in critical in keeping the noise floor in check. The last piece of the puzzle is a very special circuit that I designed and have tweaked for years. It is last in line. All I can tell you here, without having to kill anyone, is that it is called "The Magic Box." Please note that to achieve this level of tone, ALL pedals must be on. Here is the signal chain for the magic DTR tone.

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I like your mysterious creativity, my friend! There's nothing like having a few secrets and invisible cables!
 
I found that my audience (and my wife!) prefer the invisible cables. In fact, my wife, who knows NOTHING about any of this, said that the new invisible cables were her favorite bit of gear that I've ever had. This from a woman who has bought me 3 PRS guitars! But, she said she loved how (and please excuse what I think, or hope... to be an incorrect term here) "it lowers the noise level." She said, "honey when you play like that, the lower the noise level the better." I think it was a compliment... not really certain.

Oh, and for those of you who might look down on my pedal "board" I just want to say, the TS9, DS-1 and Metal Zone ARE all Keeley Modified! So there!
 
Here is mine. Got rid of my larger amp that I never used, and I do love this little Blackstar. Forgive the wires, I set it up in the effects loop and didn't clean the wires up. Need an expression pedal though. Either going to run it into a POD HD500X amp modeler or pony up for a Kemper

 
I worked a bit on mine to get it up to snuff, to go with the fantastic boards the rest of you have posted.

In terms of clarity and tone, this is my best iteration yet - the Koji Comp made a big difference in the usefulness and overall goodness of the board:

 
Here's my board and my amp. Fender 2x12 with 100w and reverb. Wonderful sparkly clean tones and takes pedals great! Can go from super clean to super heavy. I must say I'm really disappointed in the Compressor pedal. Seems to sap my tone completely. No me gusta.
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I worked a bit on mine to get it up to snuff, to go with the fantastic boards the rest of you have posted.

In terms of clarity and tone, this is my best iteration yet - the Koji Comp made a big difference in the usefulness and overall goodness of the board:


Your board looks great, Les. Can you please tell me what brand of patch cords you are using?
I just upgraded my guitar cables to Mogami Gold but my board still has the planet waves patch cords.
 
Your board looks great, Les. Can you please tell me what brand of patch cords you are using?
I just upgraded my guitar cables to Mogami Gold but my board still has the planet waves patch cords.

Thanks, Tahlee!

They're Lava Cable "The Bay C5 Hybrid Patch Cable." They sound very clear, though my old board had PRS patch cables made by Van Damme in England, and it sounded great, too.

The only reason I changed is that I couldn't find a company that offered custom-terminated Van Damme cables, so I ordered these.

EDIT: I should mention that I could have used the PRS cables for three of the connections, but I didn't because I'm a complete geek and wanted the damn cables to match!

These Lava cables are a bit stiff because of the way they're constructed, so if you need more flexible cables, they now offer their Ultramafic in a more flexible version. I got these before their new cable came out. However, if you don't need custom-terminated cables, I really like the PRS cables. They're far more flexible and sound great.

Lava also makes some of their cables with mini-connectors if space on your board is an issue. On the other hand, I like cables that have beefier plugs with strain relief because I'm always worried about a connection going bad during a session, even though the larger plugs take up a lot of room. Lava does a nice job terminating their cables, and they also use very good strain relief under the barrels, good for my sense of paranoia. ;)
 
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The Lava cables seem nice. I like the purple Ultramafic ones. Here's my board:


That's a nice board! Very sweet selection of stuff on it!

If you get the purple Ultramafic, the ones that aren't the Flex model are very thick and even stiffer - I have a couple that I used on the other board before getting the PRS interconnects, and that model just doesn't want to bend easily at all. However, the smaller Mini Ultramafic is great for pedalboards, it flexes much more easily. I have some of those from an even earlier board. And they sound great, as does the very stiff one.

I haven't tried the Ultramafic Flex yet.

"The Bay C5 Hybrid" are super nice sounding cables, even though they're a bit stiff. I picked that model because it was recommended to partner with Van den Hul cables, and I thought I might be going in that direction, but decided to stick with the PRS cables from pedalboard to guitar.

In truth, I think the most important thing about cables is the question of impedance, and the Ultramafic and Bay have very low impedance. In any case, they all pass the audio in a good way, and seem impervious to EMI and RFI. The PRS cable is very low in impedance, too.

Lava does very nice work, and they offer some unique choices. Hard to go wrong! I think they're very consistent suppliers, fast, and do superb work. I've never had a failure with their cables. I also run a 50 foot Lava speaker cable from one of my amp heads to one of my cabs that I sometimes take out of the room I work in and put in my storage room, so a long run is needed. Works great, sounds great.

I used Mogami for years, my whole studio was wired with it when I had a 500 point patch bay, and believe me, that was a LOT of cables. My newer studio is wired with it, too, though I'm more in the box now, and don't need as many cables.

And I used it for years for guitar, too. In fact, I switched to the PRS cables for guitar mainly because it's so flexible, it doesn't get tangled for me to trip over in the studio. But I still have some of the Mogami. It's good stuff. I have some Mogami microphone cables and snakes in the studio that my tech made for me in 1992, and I still use them daily! 23 years and counting is a heck of a good service life!
 
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Thanks, Tahlee!

They're Lava Cable "The Bay C5 Hybrid Patch Cable." They sound very clear, though my old board had PRS patch cables made by Van Damme in England, and it sounded great, too.
;)
I honestly can't see patch cables ever being an issue unless they have frayed or oxidized or something. The guitar signal is going through far tinier connections in your pedals than in your cables, and those patch cables are too short to make a diff as far as resistance or capacitance.
 
I honestly can't see patch cables ever being an issue unless they have frayed or oxidized or something. The guitar signal is going through far tinier connections in your pedals than in your cables, and those patch cables are too short to make a diff as far as resistance or capacitance.
That's generally true. My George L's have been fantastic for many years and I still have about 8' of bulk left. I can make replacement cables as necessary for several more years. But their weakness is ham-fisted operation cycles. If I grab a pedal and quickly yank out the cable, there are only so many of those cycles allowed before the connection starts to go south. The resistance increases exponentially so I usually trim 3/8" off each end and re-terminate. Instant new cable! It doesn't sound like much, but with each cable measuring 16 ohms, it doesn't add up to much, but when that increases 10x, added to the 28' of guitar cable, it becomes a tonal colorant. As an experiment, I picked up some mid-range right angle 1/4" plugs and soldered the George L's cable. The results are beyond excellent. Granted, the solderless terminations are a huge convenience, but sometimes a soldered connection is the best answer. Cable-wise, the George L's sounds very good to me and I'm not compelled to make a change anytime soon. But some maintenance is require if you make periodic changes to the pedalboard.

For instrument cables, I'm very old school...Canare + Neutrik.
 
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I honestly can't see patch cables ever being an issue unless they have frayed or oxidized or something. The guitar signal is going through far tinier connections in your pedals than in your cables, and those patch cables are too short to make a diff as far as resistance or capacitance.

I don't agree, and I'll get into that momentarily, but in shorthand there's substantial length and added capacitance between pedals when it's added up, plus EMI and RFI rejection matter, noise matters.

But my pedalboard has a different wrinkle from most anyway so I'll start there.

What you can't see in the picture of my board is what's under the surface lid of the pedalboard. The cable from the instrument input to the wah is about three feet, to provide sufficient clearance for the power cables from the power supply, and to have service length, when I open the lid to change something on the board or work underneath (this board has a hinged surface that acts as a lid, there is an enclosed bottom where the power supply lives, which is great for keeping the innards clean). The cable from the H9 to the board's output is about two feet -- again, so there's sufficient service length when the lid is opened. There's a 10 inch cable from the wah to the buffer.

That's nearly 6 feet feet of cable before we get into the question of the interconnects between the pedals, at least on my board.

The Bay C5 cable I used has a capacitance of 32-ish picofarads per foot. That's about half (or less) of the capacitance of a typical cable. It's also very well shielded, and I have a very, very quiet pedalboard, no hums or buzzes whatsoever. That's important to me, because what I use this board for is my session work.

Aside from the question of noise and hum rejection, if I'd used a typical cable just for these pre-buffer runs, I'd have the equivalent capacitance of a 12 foot run of the C5.

In my setup, it makes an audible difference. I know this because while I was waiting for the C5 to be made when I first got the board, I wired the longer connections up with 3 foot lengths of Mogami. When I swapped the Mogami out for the C5, I noticed less roll-off on the high frequencies. There's an even larger difference when the guitar's volume control comes into play. I use my guitars' volume controls all the time, I hardly ever run them full up. Capacitance that rolls off high end doesn't just come from the pots on the guitar, cable capacitance also loads the pickups. This is most important with the cleaner tones I often use.

I only use a 10 foot cable from the guitar to the pedalboard for the same reason -- cable length matters! I've done an awful lot of experiments to prove to my satisfaction that even a few feet matter.

Sure, I could avoid the cables between the pedalboard inputs, outputs and the pedals, if I simply wanted to plug my guitar cable into the wah each time I use it, and the output cable into the H9.

But one of the things that appeals to me about this pedalboard is that everything's all set up and ready to go, and I plug into the jacks on the board top rear, without having to monkey with the pedals (I don't want to have to think about the many times I plugged a cable into the wrong jack on the back of the H9 before getting this pedalboard, got no audio, and freaked out until realizing, "crap, I put the cable into the wrong jack").

As to your point about the connections inside the pedals themselves, there isn't anything about that I can control. However, I can control the length of the interconnects, their inherent capacitance, etc.

So I can - and do - minimize the capacitance of the rig by paying attention to the interconnects. Between the various pedals on the board, not including the connections to the inputs and outputs on the board, there are 56 inches of cable in my setup, that's 4 feet, eight inches. At less than half the capacitance of standard cable, however, it's like only having a couple of feet of cable between the pedals in total. Does it matter? As Paul R. Smith says, everything matters, down to the last detail!

NOTE: If you are a high gain player, you don't necessarily want all this high frequency detail, right? Because it can make a high gain amp sound too bright and harsh. But I'd rather make that choice with the amp's EQ or the guitar's EQ, than have it made for me by the cables no matter what I'm doing.

One thing about my rig that might be different from most is that coming out of the pedalboard, I run a cable to a passive splitter box that lets me quickly switch between both of my PRS amps without having to slow down the creative flow by getting up and re-connecting to the other amp. So there's quite a bit of extra cable length in my studio, and that's one reason a good buffer and low capacitance cables before the buffer are essential for what I do.

The bottom line: my board is transparent when the pedals are switched off. The sound is clear, very crisp, and there's no noise. There's no noise generated by the power supply, it doesn't seem to pick up stray EMI or RFI anywhere. This is a good thing, especially so when I use, say, a compressor pedal that will tend to magnify noise generated by the pedals and wiring, etc.

Another strange thing I've found where cable capacitance seems to come into play is that using the volume control with certain cabling, there is an increase in low frequency hum and noise at about 1/3 the volume pot's rotation, until you get about 2/3 up in the rotation. With shorter, lower capacitance cable, this is inaudible or nonexistent. I don't know why exactly this happens, but I've proven it true in my studio, and it seems to be related to cable length, or possibly to the effectiveness of the shielding. Playing clean, it's clearly audible.

So whether I'm set up at my studio, which is usually the case, or at my partner's studio, which is sometimes the case, I'm ready to roll, no noise, get down to business, do the session, and pack it up. I do get a lot of nice compliments on the tone of the guitar regarding my clips here, from guys who seem to care about that, but also from clients. And I get paid very well to do my sessions, so I feel it's my obligation to sound as good as I can, plus it adds to my enjoyment of the creative experience. So it's worth it.
 
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That's generally true. My George L's have been fantastic for many years and I still have about 8' of bulk left. I can make replacement cables as necessary for several more years. But their weakness is ham-fisted operation cycles. If I grab a pedal and quickly yank out the cable, there are only so many of those cycles allowed before the connection starts to go south. The resistance increases exponentially so I usually trim 3/8" off each end and re-terminate. Instant new cable! It doesn't sound like much, but with each cable measuring 16 ohms, it doesn't add up to much, but when that increases 10x, added to the 28' of guitar cable, it becomes a tonal colorant. As an experiment, I picked up some mid-range right angle 1/4" plugs and soldered the George L's cable. The results are beyond excellent. Granted, the solderless terminations are a huge convenience, but sometimes a soldered connection is the best answer. Cable-wise, the George L's sounds very good to me and I'm not compelled to make a change anytime soon. But some maintenance is require if you make periodic changes to the pedalboard.

For instrument cables, I'm very old school...Canare + Neutrik.

See my comments above on whether that statement about interconnects not making a difference is generally true, as I disagree.

But hey, Canare and Neutrik aren't old-school! They're recent-school cables, and the Canare stuff is pretty special for a reason: Canare and Mogami pioneered the use of very finely stranded wires inside the cables, both for flexibility and ease of service (dunno if they were thinking about tone). US cable manufacturers had older equipment that couldn't make this finely stranded wire, and their cables were much stiffer. This fine wire also allowed the Canare and Mogami folks to put multiple cables (snakes) into smaller diameter studio snakes, that were far, far more flexible for studio installations.

That's why Mogami became the so-called "studio standard" in US recording studios, and that's why all of my studio iterations over the years have been wired with it. In my prior studio, that had a ton of analog connections, I had five 96 point patch bays, each point in each bay going to a plug that went into a piece of equipment's input or output jacks. A 96 point bay is the equivalent of 96 cables! And I had 5 of them, all loaded up! Mogami cut the bulk of all that cabling with old-style cables down considerably.

And of course, Canare and Mogami sound very good, the fine stranding seems to have had sonic benefits.

That works great for cabling that doesn't have to be moved, you install studio equipment and it sits there. But they also tackled the question of better instrument cable shielding, which the fine stranded cable allowed them to do without the penalty of heavy thick cables, and microphone cable shielding with Quad twisted pair cables that Canare invented. This cable rejects hum and noise demonstrably better than typical cables, and is now the studio standard mic cable configuration.

So that's pretty high tech stuff, hardly old-school!

Finally, GeorgeL's sounds very detailed, bright and good because it's very low-capacitance cable - far lower than is typical of most cables. It isn't shielded quite as well as some of the newer cables on the market, which is its achilles' heel, but I never had much noise with it when I used it.

I agree with you, the cable lasts longer if it's soldered.

The reason I switched away from George Ls is exactly the problem you note: after a while, unless the cables are soldered, eventually, you're re-cutting the connections, throwing away some of the plugs that seem to stop working if they're re-terminated too many times, etc. For me, it got to be kind of a pain in the butt, because I tend to switch stuff in and out of the board fairly often. So I just order pre-terminated cables from Lava if I need some. They do a great job with their terminations, never seem to fail, and also they are thoughtful enough to use extra strain relief jackets on the connections. So you have a strong cable that lasts. A good thing. I also have had great luck with the PRS cables.
 
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Les, you dropped the Bogner for the Plimsoul?

Not really.

I've had a Plimsoul around since they first came out, and as with several pedals, they've been on and off the board a bunch of times. I'm able to get a traditional "pedal" sound out of the Plimsoul. I run it with the dial in a very soft setting, and get kind of a tube screamer thing going with it. I even roll off much of the high end, for this gooey, compressed sound that works with either of my amps in a certain way. Here's an example; about a quarter of the way in on this track, I used the Plimsoul that way for a short solo passage, and also toward the end. All guitar tracks were with the DG30 and the DG30 cab:

https://soundcloud.com/lschefman/fc-instrumental

The Bogner pedals are actually better for what most of us want in an overdrive, namely, sounding like an amp.

But I have two great amps that I switch between, so I started using the Plimsoul to get that "thing" happening, and have just kind of stuck with it the past few months.

"Then why don't you keep both overdrives on your pedalboard, Les?"

Well...because then I go back and forth between them trying to decide which one to use for what, and I get all crazy. So I've basically reduced my choices. If I want a gainier amp sound, I use the HXDA and turn up the gain. If I want a really gainy and authentic amp sound, I push the HXDA with a boost pedal. If I want crazy gain, I run a fuzz.

But if I want the sound of an OD pedal I use the Plimsoul for now. I might decide to go with a Bogner, or an Xotic BB Plus down the road. I kind of like to change things up every now and then.
 
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