Troubleshooting pedal boards

[olddawg]

I'm just curious what everyone else does? It's not like I'm not a seasoned tech... but I'm a bit like the odd mechanic that drives beater cars. I have a bit of a complex pedal board that has not passed signal at set up at my last 2 gigs. I just start finger f@@king the damn thing until it starts working.... and it works fine the rest of the night. Then.. at home I can't get it to have a problem at all! It's a bit maddening.

[Enzo]

Like anything else:

Isolate the Problem.

Apply a steady signal to free your hands. A CD player or something. REmember, we are looking for loss of signal, not tone, so it doesn't matter if the signal itself sounds good. Now gently pull out and repush each patch cord to see if one is involved. Might be the cord or the jacks, but if we know WHERE we are mostly there. In fact, just grasping the middle of each patch cord and wiggling it in a circle reveals much.

The fact you can fiddle with it and it works screams that it is a connection somewhere. So if the connections don't get it, grab a screwdriver by the blade, and whack the body of each pedal sharply. This is a mini version of my fist-whacking the chassis of an amp. If any pedal reacts, it is suspect.

Gently grasp each control on each pedal, one at a time, and slightly tweak its setting. Does moving ANY control bring the sound back?

If you are using a supply rather than batteries, then each and every power connection needs to be wiggled and stressed. Don't forget the other end of the power wires.

lets say you have ten pedals.

[airplane mode]"you have ten pedals"[/airplane mode]

then plug your signal into the input of #5 instead of #1. Still lost or now works? And the other way. Plug the amp cord into the output of #5 instead of the last pedal output. This could tell us which half of the pedal lineup has the problem.

[olddawg]

Like anything else:

Isolate the Problem.

Apply a steady signal to free your hands. A CD player or something. REmember, we are looking for loss of signal, not tone, so it doesn't matter if the signal itself sounds good. Now gently pull out and repush each patch cord to see if one is involved. Might be the cord or the jacks, but if we know WHERE we are mostly there. In fact, just grasping the middle of each patch cord and wiggling it in a circle reveals much.

The fact you can fiddle with it and it works screams that it is a connection somewhere. So if the connections don't get it, grab a screwdriver by the blade, and whack the body of each pedal sharply. This is a mini version of my fist-whacking the chassis of an amp. If any pedal reacts, it is suspect.

Gently grasp each control on each pedal, one at a time, and slightly tweak its setting. Does moving ANY control bring the sound back?

If you are using a supply rather than batteries, then each and every power connection needs to be wiggled and stressed. Don't forget the other end of the power wires.

lets say you have ten pedals.

[airplane mode]"you have ten pedals"[/airplane mode]

then plug your signal into the input of #5 instead of #1. Still lost or now works? And the other way. Plug the amp cord into the output of #5 instead of the last pedal output. This could tell us which half of the pedal lineup has the problem.

Yeah... that’s pretty much what I did at home. Gremlins. I’m beginning to think the drive vibrates something loose in the signal path. Once it’s corrected it doesn’t fail until the next drive. Time to set the board on some foam and break out the rubber mallet!

[Chuck H]

If you have anything digital in there, there is also the possibility that it's getting hinky with a boot sequence or something. Very often with digital things, appliances, etc. I've seen them not work until disconnected from power and reconnected again. Unfortunately that's not the kind of thing that can be easily fixed But at least it may be possible to isolate and identify if you're lucky (?) enough to get the problem to manifest with the system under test.

[olddawg]

I have a EX C9 that gives me grief somometimes. But it doesn't upset the signal path. It just won't engage until reset. Yeah the first thing I do is recycle the power. Intermitants are madding. I feel like the mechanic whose car won't start. And of course my band mates love to piss on me about it!

[Chuck H]

Doctors get sick too.

[The Dude]

A good argument for a single multi-effects pedal. I've never liked a lot of pedals for intermittent connections and for the tone-robbing/signal loss they insert.

A little story. I was in a band with a guitar player once that had to use a bass guitar case for a pedal board. We called it "The Borg". His pedal collection had grown that large. He was constantly fiddling with it to get everything working and constantly complaining about loss of signal and sustain. At rehearsal one night, he was about to go ballistic battling tone problems. I asked him to humor me and just plug his guitar directly into the amp. There it was- the tone he'd been looking for. He sold all but "necessary" pedals and got back down to the little plastic Roland pedal board.

The rest of the story?: As time went on, he bought one more pedal, then one more, then one more, etc. and ended up back at square one. I guess it's just an addiction for some people.

I bought a Boss ME-30 years ago and never looked back. One input and one output. There are plenty of good multi-effects units out there.

[Chuck H]

A dirt box or boost pedal (depending on the type of amp and the gig), a wah pedal, a delay if you don't have reverb on the amp and a chorus pedal for imitating SRV roto tone stuff. What the heck else could anyone need?

Ok, I do have a couple of other pedals and I enjoy them sometimes in creative moods. But I don't need them on stage.

[Gnobuddy]

A dirt box or boost pedal (depending on the type of amp and the gig), a wah pedal, a delay if you don't have reverb on the amp and a chorus pedal for imitating SRV roto tone stuff. What the heck else could anyone need?

I use a graphic EQ pedal for all sorts of tone tweaks. I think these are the most overlooked guitar FX pedals out there. They don't make a huge dramatic change to your sound like kicking in a hot distortion pedal. But they can fix a lot of small problems and can make you sound better if you take your time adjusting them.

No wah for me (for the music I play, I've never wanted one). I do have a chorus pedal, it stays off except for those times when my wife feels like singing Cindi Lauper's "Time After Time". Gotta have full-on cheesy '80s chorus sounds for that song, it just won't sound right without it!

I am not playing for customers, though, so I have more leeway than you guys (and gals) who do this professionally.

-Gnobuddy

[Chuck H]

Oh I don't know if you "need" chorus for Time After Time. Here's one of my favorite duo's covering it. Just one guitarist and a singer:

EDIT: If any guitar player here decided to look into purchasing Tuck and Patti, Tears of Joy just know that you run the very real risk of either changing your ideologies as a player or tossing your guitar at a passing car

[Gnobuddy]

Oh I don't know if you "need" chorus for Time After Time.

Okay, you don't need chorus if you have Tuck & Patti's level of talent.

(And if you do a complete re-interpretation of the song as well. Which, of course, is a perfectly valid artistic choice!)

Cyndi Lauper's original version, to me, is a classic example of tasteless '80s guitar effects. They ladled on the chorus so thick that the guitar doesn't sound anything like a guitar. It sounds more like a terminally sick clavichord that's crawled off to die somewhere in the mist.

If you want a quick mental refresh on what a clavichord sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWOhzki9TGg

See what I mean?

-Gnobuddy

[Mark Hammer]

If anyone is a fan of Annie Clark / AKA St. Vincent, know that her uncle is Tuck Andress.

[Mark Hammer]

Something else to consider

Just curious. Are any of the pedals on your pedalboard "boo-teek" pedals that flaunt true bypass switching?

I ask because one of the common things I run into has to do with the switches. Inside there are small blobs of thick grease intended to do two things: damp and "chatter" in the contacts for debouncing purposes, and hold the rocker contacts in place during assembly.

If too much heat is applied when soldering wires to the solder lugs on the footswitch, the heat can get conducted to where the grease is and cause it to essentially liquify and flow over the contact. This can make for either NO electrical continuity, or intermittent contact (i.e., a good half-dozen successive on-off cycles and you're back in business).

There is nothing wrong with the switches themselves (i.e., buying a "better" switch won't improve anything), but rather the manner in which they were installed. If the builder happened to buy a small lot of switches or had them hanging around for a while, the solder lugs can gettarnished, and the builder responds by applying more heat for longer during soldering, which can potentiate the problem.

If this is possibly your circumstance, I can show you how to remedy it.

[Leo_Gnardo]

If anyone is a fan of Annie Clark / AKA St. Vincent, know that her uncle is Tuck Andress.

Kool! It's nice to know who's related to whom in this crazy music biz. Last year on MEF I put up a video of St. Vincent giving the Hendrix treatment to the old Beatles' chestnut "I Dig A Pony." Who knows maybe she got her start trying to play like Uncle Tuck. In any case Annie's got formidable chops plus a terrific sense of humor. My kind of gal!

[olddawg]

Just curious. Are any of the pedals on your pedalboard "boo-teek" pedals that flaunt true bypass switching?

I ask because one of the common things I run into has to do with the switches. Inside there are small blobs of thick grease intended to do two things: damp and "chatter" in the contacts for debouncing purposes, and hold the rocker contacts in place during assembly.

If too much heat is applied when soldering wires to the solder lugs on the footswitch, the heat can get conducted to where the grease is and cause it to essentially liquify and flow over the contact. This can make for either NO electrical continuity, or intermittent contact (i.e., a good half-dozen successive on-off cycles and you're back in business).

There is nothing wrong with the switches themselves (i.e., buying a "better" switch won't improve anything), but rather the manner in which they were installed. If the builder happened to buy a small lot of switches or had them hanging around for a while, the solder lugs can gettarnished, and the builder responds by applying more heat for longer during soldering, which can potentiate the problem.

If this is possibly your circumstance, I can show you how to remedy it.

This is the beast. I can’t get it to act up now... so we will see Saturday night . The A/B/Y Switch toggles my input to my talk box amp. The power supply is a daisy chained One Spot. The other power supply is for the EHX C9. The other block on the power strip is an AC voltmeter so I know instantly if there’s a mains problem. I “true bypassed” the compressor. The whole mess is a bit of a cludge but I’ve been using it for 10 years. I’m not a gear snob. It’s just plywood and Velcro. I just get annoyed with “board gremlins”.. especially 5 minutes before you start a gig. But I don’t think I’ve ever had a gig where someone didn’t have an issue with something.