A very overdiscussed subject

[John Egerton]

I know a lot of you guys have been talking about remote footswitching for a while now and to be honest I didn;t see what the big deal was.... I kept saying "the pedals are right there, at your feet! Why would you want to put them somewhere else". That was until today when I realised that my VERY expensive supersize pedalboard had run out of room for pedals... belive me when I say that I am absolutley devastated.  :cry:

Now I know why you guy have been going on about this subject for some time.. Now you have my attention

I looked on the geofex site and their remote bypassing system looks a little complicated.. All this for a remore bypass!?

what I want to do is simple... have a hidden compartment underneath my pedalboard whereby some of my effects are in there permenantly on. The wires would then run into a remote bypass unit comprising of a few DPDT switches. When one effect is activated, the pedal it is blocking will be allowed to pass through the siganl chain.

Does anyone know how I would be able to do this? Would it require fpowerr to boost the signal through the additional wire?

Thanks

John

[Mike Burgundy]

takes up a heck of a lot of cables and jacks, but what you're talking about is basicaslly a bypass box. Signal goes in, there's a switchable loop, and signal goes out. Hook up the effect to the loop, and youre done.
You still need a box large enough to house  a DPDT and 4 jacks though, and one of those per effect.

[MarkB]

Something that may save you some room is... if you're wanting to put your pedals underneath the actual pedalboard.. you could use RG's 'steel stud' enclosure method and make a long 'bypass box' with like 10 switches - it would take up far less room on the board than 10 pedals.   You could probably even put a 9v jack on it and run LED indicators..

or you can do what everyone else does and drop 10 grand on a Bradshaw/Cornish system... you guys have all done that, right?
"-)

[Paul Marossy]

I saw one of those Bradshaw systems on Scott Henderson's website. It looks like it would really help when you have a lot of rack mounted equipment and pedals and whatever. It talks about it a little bit under the equipment section of his website.

http://www.scotthenderson.net

[R.G.]

Maybe I can help.

I have in mind an article on a pedalboard that combines the steel stud enclosures with the remote bypassing stuff and the Spyder power supply.

Imagine: two light gauge steel studs, each about 24" long. These are spaced about two feet apart on a plywood board. The farthest one contains a Spyder, with a pot full of isolated 9V (or other voltage) power supplies.  The near one has the footswitches, indicator LEDs, and relays (or CMOS for cheap) bypasses. The pedals all sit on the board between the two studs, held down by velcro or bicycle chain links. The pedals are all cabled to the bypass switching stuff.

A removable cover goes over the whole mess, and there's a handle on it. Unplug the thing, put the cover on it, and you're good to go. Setup is just as easy.

There's a RJ11 jack on the side of one of the studs. That can be plugged into a remote stick of steel stud which lets you do bypassing remotely, with LEDs. The LEDs on  both local and remote footswitcher track, so you always know what's on.

[BillyJ]

I imagine two steel studs about 19' in a rack with the pedals below the two facing out held onto speaker grill with bike chain links so you can reach back and grab all them knobs we soewnd too much time soldering in :O)
I like to tweak the knobs alot and I can't bend over like I used to :O)

[william]

How many pedals do you people use usually?  I use only a noise gate usually but sometimes an envelope filter in the Noise gates loop or a delay in the amp's loop.  Even when I use my podXT for practice, I usually only use the amp models, and the tube screamer FX model to add some high end.  I'm thinking I might add a compressor though.

William

[Rory]

On average, I've got anywhere from 10-20 pedals in my system on a given day.

[brett]

Hi.  How many pedals at once?  In order to keep things simple, I arrange my boxes in groups of 4 and change between groups depending on what I'm playing.

e.g. blues = orange squeezer, wah, FuzzFace or EZFUZZ or Tube-sound fuzz, rebote delay
rock = Dyna compressor, MXR 45 phaser or RM Octavia, TS7 or TS9 or VoodooDrive, Rebote delay

So I guess I work in "categories" -
compressors; Ross/Dyna or Orange Squeezer
filters; MXR EF, home-made wah, MXR 45 phaser
distortion; FuzzFace, EZ Fuzz, Tube-sound fuzz (excellent pedal!), VoodooDrive, TS7 (bought), TS9
Octave (rarely used); RM Octavia, Tyco Octave (not as good as RM imho), Dalekator (weird, slightly annoying effect)
Echo/delay;  Rebote, Boss CE-3 (bought)
Noise gate (rarely used); MXR Noise gate
Amp simulator (ordinary imho, virtually unused); Sans amp

(Seems I have 18 pedals but only bought 2!  Crikey this is a great hobby!   )

If I were to live on a desert island and could only take 3 pedals, I'd take the Orange Squeezer, Tube-sound fuzz and VoodooDrive.  But I'd really miss my wah.  

:idea: PCBs etc for the tube-sound fuzz and VoodooDrive (and other things) are at my page: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~jethro.dog/gallery.html

Have fun! :wink: