A Tale of Two Pedalboards

How Small Can a “Big” Rig Get?

Here are two examples of cramming big-rig performance and features into a compact, over-the-shoulder pedal board format.

Both these boards share the same amplifier – A Quilter Superblock UK and the same soft, carry-case. Ideally I’d like to get another Superblock and another identical case, so both rigs are fully built without the need to share any components. When budget allows… when budget allows.

I will get round to making a video or videos of these pedal boards in the hope that some people are encouraged to build something of their own.

Rig Number One

The first of these two I put together as soon as I took delivery of a new Quilter Superblock in October 2021. This amp is worthy of having an entire rig designed around it, seeing as it sounds amazing and as close to a Marshall Plexi as I’ve got in something the size of a pedal It is actually a complete amp too, not an “Amp in a box”. A loud 25 watts of world-class tone… In my opinion.

I already had the pedalboard case and the board itself as I’ve been into the complete amp & pedals on a board idea for some time. I redesigned the architecture of the board design to accommodate my new ideas and also to overcome some technical issues regarding proximity of power sources to certain audio devices causing excess noise.

Board number one is what I loosely call the classic or vintage rig with it’s always-on fuzz (which of course can be turned off), volume pot cleanup in a pedal (a repurposed MXR Phase95 that broke down), programmable loop switcher for choosing between 4 different levels of gain/distortion on the fly and as many modulation and time-based effects that I’ll ever need on one board.

The loop switcher enables me to do with one touch of the foot what would normally require tap-dancing on about 4 different pedals. E.G. I can go from my clean rhythm tone with a phaser to a full, all-drives-stacked lead setting without the phaser with one tap and then back again with one more tap.

It took some doing, getting everything worked into the compact board space, not only to get it to fit, but to have reliable access to all the switches I need to access and also in a way that minimised the amount of noise. There’s quite a lot of spaghetti under there!

Rig Number Two

Completed very recently. In fact, not-quite complete because I’m waiting for some 3M Dual Lock to arrive to finish securing the last pedal and amp power supply in place.

This is just as adventurous a rig design as the fully-stocked “Classic” rig, although it looks a lot more simplistic. Well it’s more simple in that there are less connections, patch cables and wires in total, but it’s complex in other ways to board one.

First of all, it has two totally separate signal paths: One forming a traditional “Pedals & amp” rig and the second providing a clean, balanced DI signal for turning my electric guitar into an acoustic guitar.

With a flick of a toggle switch on the input box I can select which path to take and with the same guitar I can transform my electric rig into an acoustic one. Of course it requires me to use two inputs to the PA system, so that they can then be independently setup to sound their best.

I have a Telecaster-style guitar with an under-saddle piezo pickup on it, which, when sent through an impulse response of an acoustic guitar sounds very realistic as a real acoustic guitar, especially on stage or in a mix. I made a video of my Hybrid acoustic/electric Esquire, stealth Tele. It works really well.

I’m also in the process of modifying my Fender Jaguar to have a piezo tune-o-matic bridge on it, so I have another hybrid guitar. I always like to have two comparable guitars in terms of features in case I break a string at a gig and I need to grab a backup.

The newest acquisition to board two is the NU-X Optima Air, which is the acoustic IR loader pedal. It took some setting up and tweaking with the software app. I had to reduce the levels of the IRs to avoid unwanted clipping into my audio interface and also I loaded the acoustic IRs that I have already used in my DAW, which I prefer to the stock sounds in the Optima Air. It’s a very handy way to just switch on an acoustic sound though. I’ll be using it for recording too as I find it less clunky than playing through an IR loader plugin.

The Cerberus can also load acoustic IRs and I tried that in the past, but it just wasn’t possible to integrate the functionality of the acoustic IR tones with the conventional guitar effects without changing modes on the device and unplugging patch cables here and there.

This simple solution just required an extra device and a modification to my input box (the toggle switch and an extra output). It was a bit of a challenge getting it all to fit in that little box, but it worked and it was free!

The idea for how to implement an additional, acoustic signal path was the basis for the design layout for this rig. It doesn’t have the wonderfully convenient loop switching of board one, but it makes up for it with the extra feature. Besides, I do have the overdrive and distortion configured to flip-flop between the two though, so it kind of does have a one-function loop switcher for my main distortion tones.

Between these two rigs I’d say I can cover nearly every style of music (except the styles I can’t actually play!)