Pedal boards have been a mainstay in the rigs of both professional and amateur guitar players for decades, and for good reason. While guitars are incredibly versatile by themselves, many of the most iconic guitarists are famous for creating sounds and tones that simply wouldn’t be possible without their pedalboards. This means that if you want to emulate your favorite guitarists or experiment with creating new sounds, you need to know just what a guitar pedal board is and why they are so important.
A guitar pedal board is essentially a board or frame that guitar players can use to house, organize, and transport their guitar effects pedals. This makes it much easier for guitarists to use their collection of effects pedals without having to worry about repeatedly setting up and tearing down long and complex pedal chains every time they want to play.
Pedalboards come in a wide variety of different shapes and sizes, which allows a guitarist to pick and choose or build a board that meets their needs. For example, while some guitar players may only need a small, simple board with enough room to place a few pedals, others may need more space to store larger collections of pedals, utilize effects loops, house integrated power supplies, and more.
While pedalboards themselves don’t have any effect on the overall tone you get out of your guitar, they do provide a variety of other benefits that have made them popular among guitar players in all genres, the first of which is convenience.
Long pedal chains can be unruly to deal with and can take a long time to set up and tear down every time you want to move your rig. Pedalboards fix this issue by providing a more permanent home for your pedals that keeps them connected into one piece of equipment that can quickly be set up and packed away in an instant.
Pedalboard also makes safely transporting your pedals much easier. While an exposed pedalboard isn’t necessarily the most durable piece of equipment in the world, most pedalboards come with either a soft or hard case that makes transporting them a breeze while also providing enough protection to keep them safe during transit.
Lastly, attaching your effects pedals to a pedalboard makes it much easier to use your pedals while you are playing. Pedal chains laid out on the floor are susceptible to sliding around and moving when you’re not looking, which can make pressing down on your stomp boxes precisely when you need to a challenge. Pedals on your board, however, are fastened in place and can’t move anywhere, making it easy to know that the pedal you want to hit is exactly where you expect it to be, even if you don’t have the time to look down.
While pedalboards by themselves are simple pieces of equipment, figuring out how to organize the pedals on a pedalboard can be complicated. Not only do you need to ensure that there is enough space to house all your pedals, but you’ll also need to make sure that you can feasibly connect them all with patch cables and power them all with some external power supply, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
When it comes to organizing a pedal board, the most significant challenge that most players face is figuring out pedal order. Different effects pedals have different effects on the signal you send through them, so the order in which you organize your pedals can have a big effect on the sound that you ultimately produce.
Many guitarists spend years experimenting with different pedal orders, and while there is no one, single correct way to do it, there is widely accepted knowledge that you can use to create a pedal order that works well right away.
In general, your pedal chain should start with a buffer, followed by compressors, boosts, overdrives/distortion pedals, and fuzz pedals. Then comes delay pedals, reverb, and modulation pedals, including chorus pedals, flangers, and phasers. Then, if you have a wah pedal, this
should come next, with volume pedals and looper pedals being the final pieces of your chain if you have them.
Once you plan out the order of your pedal chain, you can get back into details of where exactly each pedal will go on the board. All that really matters is that your patch cables can reach each pedal and that your power source is easily accessible by each, either from under or on top of the board.
Are you looking for a new pedalboard that you can use to bring your sound to the next level? Look no further than Pedal Pad.
Pedal Pad specializes in hand-building custom pedalboards that guitar players can fine-tune to meet their specific needs. From the size and style of the board to added features like built-in ¼ inch jacks, power switches, and more, Pedal Pad gives you complete control over every aspect of the design.
Mass-produced boards can be boring, clunky, and inconvenient to set up, but with a unique hardcase pedalboard design and a variety of amazing features to choose from, Pedal Pad pedalboards make all of these problems a thing of the past.
Here at Pedal Pad, we believe that every guitar player deserves a great pedalboard, so don’t settle for anything less than the best. Contact Pedal Pad and start designing your new dream pedalboard today!
