A couple random questions about pedal placement

[skullservant]

1. I always put phaser after dirt, predelay and preverb. Although I'd like to try it sandwhiched between delay and verb and see how that sounds.

2. More pedals = layout compromise. I've had to put pedals upside-down, on their side, etc etc. My rule of thumb has always been if you need to change the orientation of a pedal next to another pedal, make sure that the stomp switch is nowhere near the pedal next to it's kobs. Case in point my Rusty Box is vertical now, and next to my CaveDweller. I orient the Rusty Box so that the knobs are closest to the CaveDweller, as to not mess with any of the CD knobs.

3. As far as momentary switches and tap tempo go, those pedals are always on the front row for me. They need more attention than the rest.

4. I run stuff where it fits. You've just got to practice with it and see what you use most and what you end up keeping on all the time. Pedals that I keep on all the time go in the back row, whereas my delays and reverbs go in the front for easy access

5. Tuner out on the EBVP apparently causes awful tone-sucking. My EB broke, but I always put the tuner before the VP for instant mute.

6. I like cheese more, but the combo of cheese and bacon takes it.

[Doctor X]

i always have phaser after dirt, i like it to chew it up and swirl it

i dont really use delay .... tumbleweed .... but if i do then before or after is an artistic decision that changes.
do you want repeats that evolve? or repeats that are slices of whoosh

and throw a little goats cheese in there sometimes for variety

[dubkitty]

Where would you put a phaser in your chain?

i found that i only liked my Phase 100 with fuzz when i ran it at the start of the chain. generally i prefer modulation towards the end so i can fog everything over with swoosh.

For those of you with bigger boards (in my case, the Pedaltrain Pro), how do you squeeze more pedals on there without stomping the knobs off of the row below? Or do you only rock 2 rows of pedals?

VERY CAREFULLY. for one thing, i tippy-toe rather than stomp, so i can pack the boxes more closely together. i place the boxes as close to the upper/lower edge of the board as possible, and use pancake connectors on all the patch cords inside the board boundaries. i turn pedals around so they're 90º to the rest of the board and i can squeeze them in between the top tier and the bottom tier. most of my filter/modulation/reverb have top-mounted jacks, so they can sit right next to each other with no intersticial space. and i arrange the side-jacked fuzz pedals so the jacks, which are in different positions on each box, are offset so they fit more closely together. i currently have 14 boxes on a Pedaltrain 1, 5 of which are double-sized, and have room for one more big box which i'm saving for a Randy's Revenge or PDLX.

it also helps if the boxes on the lower tier are MXR-sized and have side-mounted DC jacks, which leaves more room between the tiers to cram things in sidewise.

some boxes have to be placed carefully because they have taller knobs, e.g. the "synth-style" knobs on my FHFX fuzzes, which have to be out of the way of my foot. i try to place them in front of boxes which are always on (Ghost Echo) or don't get used as much. if you try different placements you'll figure out what works. it's something of an art to fit things together and keep the signal chain in the order you want.

How do you deal with all of the pedals nowadays that have momentary switches for stuff, or tap tempos, and basically all need to be in the front row for easy tapping with your toe? Or not an issue for you? (I can hit them, but I'd prefer access to all of them.)

the only tap tempo stuff i have now is on my looping board, where the loopers are down in front. if i get the PDLX i'll run it at the front of the chain so it'll be easy to get to.

What about running effects wherever they'll fit rather than visually right-to-left in the signal chain order? Confuse you? (Or, I guess, you set them up that way so you know what order they're in.. fuck the next guy who tries to stomp on your board, he shouldn't be touching it.)

i do this to a certain extent. though most stuff goes side-by-side, i have two fuzzes in the center/third tier which are wired into the chain below.

Lastly, does anyone actually use the tuner-out on an Ernie Ball Vol Jr?

i've always heard that this is a horrible tone sucker, so i've never tried it.

Also, do you like cheese or bacon more?

cheese...you can put bacon on pizza, but you can't make pizza without cheese.

it just struck me the other day that since my modulation, flter, and reverbs on the upper tier all have top-mounted jacks, i can use longer connecting cords and treat the top tier like a patch bay, re-patching the box order for different sounds as if the board was a modular synth.

[goroth]

Thinking about re-arranging my board. Like, tearing everything off and going with a wildly different layout. I've got a lot incoming, so I can't perfectly plan out everything. So I've got some random questions:

• Where would you put a phaser in your chain?
  
• For those of you with bigger boards (in my case, the Pedaltrain Pro), how do you squeeze more pedals on there without stomping the knobs off of the row below? Or do you only rock 2 rows of pedals? (which is what i'm currently doing) (Edit: realization that the combination TTT & FY2 that skully is building me is gonna be HUUUGE and I want it in the front row. gah.)
  
• How do you deal with all of the pedals nowadays that have momentary switches for stuff, or tap tempos, and basically all need to be in the front row for easy tapping with your toe? Or not an issue for you? (I can hit them, but I'd prefer access to all of them.)
  
• What about running effects wherever they'll fit rather than visually right-to-left in the signal chain order? Confuse you? (Or, I guess, you set them up that way so you know what order they're in.. fuck the next guy who tries to stomp on your board, he shouldn't be touching it.)
  
• Lastly, does anyone actually use the tuner-out on an Ernie Ball Vol Jr? Do you keep your tuner pedal on all the time? I'm thinking about doing this just so that I can get my tuner out of the way and mount it up by the top of my board, and then not have to stomp on it anymore.
  
  Also, do you like cheese or bacon more?

Good questions duder! Heaps of good answers but I've got $0.02 round here somewhere and can't help myself...

Phasers: dunno, don't own one yet, but I like mod after dirt, so.. After?
Cheese.
Ernie ball: I too have heard of tone suck issues.

Now, my favourite part: board routing!
Fit: this gets about 17 times easier if you use a loop strip. I put my pedals in small clusters (with the "correct" signal flow) then I arrange the clusters according to maximising space, and the need to quickly stomp on a given pedal. It doesn't really matter if the clusters themselves are placed a bit crazy, cos the loop strip provides the "logic" to it. What you lose in space with the strip you get back in practicality and freedom in pedal placement.
The key is using the looper to control multiple pedals per loop. (I don't understand tgp dudes with one loop per pedal, seems a waste).
For example, I currently have three dirt pedals, all on the back row. They are configured in two loops (elements in one, arc flash and hot cake in the other). Before starting the song I select the dirt that I need, then I use the looper to turn them on and off. Beside the dirt switch on the looper I've got a switch for all my modulation pedals, so I can go from clean to stacked od and fuzz plus dual flanging with two stomps, having to move my foot around 5cm in total.

You can't see it in the photo, but the whole right hand side od the second row is on two pedal train pedal risers. These are great for enabling eventual tap dancing.

Shitty reference pic:
viewtopic.php?f=149&t=393&start=13245#p513518

Hope that made sense...

[mathias]

This makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure that I'm ready to graduate up to a TB-looper yet. And I've got the compounding issue of tap tempos and stomping on the Flashback to do looping on there, so I would need to bring those out to the front, too. Also, I like to have my volume pedal front and dead center, something I picked up somewhere and really like over the near ubiquitous volume-and-wah-on-right-side-of-board you'll see over on every TGP board.

So what it really seems like is that I need to figure out all the things that I turn on/off frequently or need to tap tempo on, and put those in the front, and put everything else in the back. Then just run patch cables of various lengths to wire up all up in a the order that makes sense.

[dubkitty]

i keep my volume pedal on the left...i'm better at not falling down if i'm balancing on my right foot, and it makes sense because i have the EB stereo pan pedal to A/B select my loopers next to it (loop board | pan pedal | volume pedal | main board). i splice the VP in after fuzz and tuner/before the RV-3 so i can do volume pedal swells into the RV-3.

a big part of my pedal placement has to do with which effects i want to feed into other effects. for example, my upcoming fiter pedal will go at the front so i can do filter sweeps into the fuzz, and the potential RR would go after fuzz/before RV-3 so i can do For Whom The Bells Toll movie effects by doing cracked bell ring mod sounds into delay. the tremolo goes after the RV-3 so i can use it to amplitude/waveform modulate the repeats, and the envelope filter after that so the repeats will trigger the envelope. the flanger/chorus/vibrato and Big Reverb go last so i can environmentalize everything before, and i like to put a fairly rude fuzz at the very end for Rust Never Sleeps style sonic annihilation. i sometimes arrange the post-fuzz effects in order of their degree of time offset: the delay has more offset than the tremolo, whose oscillator frequency time-splits to smaller degrees than the delay. the tremolo's VCO has less extreme of an attack speed than the ef trigger sensitivity at its max attack setting, which in turn is a broader range than the ms of manual delay on the flanger.

sometimes logical order just doesn't work, though...certain pedals, due to their buffers or output/input impedance or whatever, don't play nicely in certain positions. e.g. i can't place my tuner at the end of the chain after the flanger because the flanger's buffer makes the tuner pop when engaged.

the problem with pedal risers is that if they aren't placed carefully your board will be too tall to fit in the hard case, and you really do want the hard case if you can possibly help it.

[Ghost Hip]

I put phasers before fuzz. I like the unstable texture it creates as opposed to the swooshiness of after fuzz phasing.

[space6oy]

i've recently switched from phasers being before delays and reverbs at the end of my chain to putting a phaser at the very end (aside from perhaps a gate if necessary or another reverb).

i haven't picked up a pedaltrain yet but have two other fairly large boards, one of which is a custom build i'm the second owner of which has an L shaped base level and two raised rows in its upper right corner, the other is simply a flat rectangle case. with the flat rectangle i tend to squeeze a third row between the front and back rows, things i'll either always leave on or that don't need any foot action aside from on/off. with the multi-tier it's more about what fits where (will snap a pic of that sometime, but its base in front of the two tiers luckily exactly can squeeze my two DL4s).

only time i use a right to left obvious signal chain is when it's just lining up and testing on the floor before a board. scatter on the board has no impact on my thoughts on the path, least not that i've noticed thus far... worst case i guess it'd just be an "oops, i forgot i still had that on too..." which honestly could happen to me either way.

i don't have an ernie ball volume jr. tuner is usually first in my signal chain aside from fuzz probe that's bitchy about not being first and ABY if i'm using more than one amp with separate pedal setups.

cheese. quit eating meat in '04. veggie bacon IS awesome though...

[dubkitty]

I put phasers before fuzz. I like the unstable texture it creates as opposed to the swooshiness of after fuzz phasing.

yeah, exactly. the texture of phasing seems to really like being fuzzified. there's an inherently growly quality to phasing which takes happily to being square-waved.

[dubkitty]

tuner is usually first in my signal chain aside from fuzz probe that's bitchy about not being first and ABY if i'm using more than one amp with separate pedal setups.

i've had the tuner first, but lately i've been running the Phantom Ring at the front which is hella fussy about input impedance so i moved the tuner to after the fuzz array, which allows me to cut everything going into the RV-3 with a single tap.

and yes, i have thought about this too much

[goroth]

Dude, veggie bacon is so cheating. If you're going to hate on killing tasty, tasty animals then don't go trying to cop that flavour . Just eat a pig

Vegetarian dishes are rad though.

[DarkAxel]

I put phasers before fuzz. I like the unstable texture it creates as opposed to the swooshiness of after fuzz phasing.

[zRobertez]

I make sure to keep my flanger, delay, and verb in the front row since two have two footswitches and I'm always foot turning the knobs on those. I don't turn the knobs on my gainy pedals much so they're all on the top row. Then I put whatever else where I like it! I do all modulation first after my tuner. I used to have a TU-2 in the tuner out of the eb volume but sometimes I would want to keep mod pedals on between songs so it was easier just to put the tuner first.

[Chankgeez]

Dude, veggie bacon is so cheating. If you're going to hate on killing tasty, tasty animals then don't go trying to cop that flavour . Just eat a pig

... but pigs are friends, not food.

[space6oy]

Dude, veggie bacon is so cheating. If you're going to hate on killing tasty, tasty animals then don't go trying to cop that flavour . Just eat a pig

... but pigs are friends, not food.

yeah, don't mean to derail the topic but that's part of why i quit. pigs, dogs, chickens, cats. even if veggie stuff is mimicking some of it, that's just for those of us who weren't raised veg and miss some variety sometimes. (fast food & restaurants in general outside of big cities are a bitch.)

some stuff i don't miss at all and am probably never gonna try the replicant of (veggie ribs? geee-ross.). i cracked a few years ago and occasionally eat seafood now though (restaurant in cancun with zero veggie options to blame), try to tell myself they're more like bugs than my aminal friends. (yup, technically pescetarian.)

anywho back on to the pedalz!