I have been playing guitar for thirty years and, like all guitarists, I tend to complicate my life with a ton of pedals, multi-effects, MiDi controllers and so on. For this reason I have to think carefully about the organization of my pedalboard, so as not to find myself with a wild forest of buttons underfoot and having to take flamenco lessons.
Designing a good pedalboard is not easy, but it is not that rocket science that is boasted by many and that scares
many others. The smartest thing you can do, when making your own pedalboard, is to proceed by putting your needs first and not necessarily the rules of the "perfect pedalboard" that are found on the web.
Just with my needs in mind, I created this Input/Output pedal. It is a very simple input and output replicator, where on one side all the cables that take the signal to and from the pedal are connected, while on the other the cables coming from the guitar and those from/to the amplifier are connected.
What is this pedal used for? It is meant to have a single point of convergence of all the stompboxes connections, which translates into practicality and order; it also allows you to have a fixed wiring of the stompboxes, avoiding any possible breakage due to wear. Last but not least, the guitar connects to the pedal and not to the amplifier; in a live performance it allows to have a short cable even if the amplifier, on stage, is distant.
The pedal (although this name sounds improper) has four pairs of 6.3mm TS jack connectors for audio signals and a pair of five-pole DIN connectors for MiDi messages.
There are four jack connections because they include:
- the guitar output which is sent to the input of the Front Amp effects section;
- the output of the Front Amp section which is sent to the amplifier input;
- the Send/Pre Out signal which is routed to the modulation effects section (reverb, chorus, etc.), or the effects that must be inserted after the preamplifier;
- the output of the modulation section which is routed to the amplifier's Return/Amp In.
Obviously this configuration, also known as the "four cable method", is for those who, like me, want to use the different channels of their amplifier (read: crunch and/or distorted channels) in combination with the effects; those who use a mono channel amplifier will have all the pedals connected to its input, so they will only need the first two connections of the router pedal.
In the following image there is the connection scheme:
The cables on the right side are those which, once finished playing, are detached and put away; the cables on the left side are the fixed ones and always connected in the pedalboard. A practical tip is to make a "multicore" cable for the four connections (jack 1, 2 3 and MiDi) that go to the amplifier; in this way there is only one large cable that connects the pedalboard and the amplifier, so as to have everything neat and clean.
WARNING!
If you decide to make this pedal and, like me, opt for a metal container (or somehow conductive), remember to use "isolated" jacks; this prevents all connections from having the ground in common through the container, generating what is called a "ground loop" or, in technical terms, a very annoying and enormous background noise in your instrumentation. |
| Some isolated jacks |
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| An isolated jack type |
Alternatively, you can use normal metal jacks, but the pedal container must be made of insulating material, such as ABS or plastic in general.
Have fun with your router pedal and thank you for reading this article.
Have fun with your router pedal and thank you for reading this article.
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