(PART 1 of 2)

Have you ever thought about building your own pedal effects board? Have you
actually built a pedal effects board only to discover that your guitar tone
has changed drastically? Believe me, you are not the first to run across this
problem. In fact the majority of pedal effects boards will change your tone,
and most of the time is it not for the better.

There are many things to consider when designing and building your pedal board.
If you’re careful to address critical issues during this process you’ll end
up with a great guitar tone. If you’re not careful you may end up with a guitar
tone that is less than desirable.

Here’s a few things that will affect your guitar tone when designing your pedal
board.

• Length of Cables
• Types of Cables
• True Bypass
• Buffering
• Unity Gain Structure

There are more things than this to examine in Part 2, but for now this will
get you on the right track to killer guitar tone when designing your effects
pedal board.

1. Length of cables - You should try to keep the length of
   your cables as short as possible. This includes the patch cables in between
   the pedals as well. The reason is that the longer your cables are, the more
   tone loss, gain loss, and high end loss occurs.
2. Types of cables - Just as the length of your cables can
   result in tone loss, so can the type of cables. This is something that is
   sort of a personal preference, but I will say that Mogami and Belden cables
   are always going to be a great choice. Keep in mind that the most important
   cable is the first cable used from your guitar to the first effects pedal.
3. True bypass - This can be good and bad depending on the
   rest of the pedals in the chain. If all of your pedals are true bypass, and
   they’re all turned off, you face the problem of all of your cable lengths
   adding up to one long cable going into the front of your amp. This is really
   bad if you are using vintage pickups with low output and high impedance. You
   should consider some type of buffer to keep the signal steady.
4. Buffering - Buffering the signal can help when using true
   bypass pedals along with vintage pickups, but you’ll have to play around with
   the combinations. You may run into issues of signal spikes and treble spikes
   depending on where the buffers are placed in the chain. Best solution is to
   plug your guitar directly into a fixed high-impedance load that is identical
   to the amp input. Then distribute the signal to the various effects and amps
   by low-impedance buffered feeds. This will give you constant signal level,
   and tone characteristics, which will not change when more effects are added.
5. Unity Gain Structure – This is another critical issue when
   it come to balancing out your sound. Example: if you used
   a chorus pedal and a delay pedal these devices are usually unity gain. When
   you get into pre-amps, equalizers and units with gain control, you’ll need
   to balance all of them out so that one unit is not louder that the other when
   turned on or off.

Hopefully this will give you some great insight when building your personal
guitar effects pedal board. If you carefully design and construct your pedal
board, your pedal effects will sound great every time you plug in for years
and years to come.

Be sure to check out Part 2 of Guitar Tone using Pedal Effects.

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Thanks, Robert Lee Molton