Friday, January 9, 2015

A Small But Functional Board With Xotic and TC Electronic Pedals


The last house gig and memoirs of playing at Blu Jazz showed me that giant pedalboards are not the way when all you need is a basic overdrive and delay sound. I thus began my search for a combination of micro-sized pedals that would require minimal setup/tear-down and maximum tone.


I initially toyed with the idea of using my improvised plastic case pedalboard, put together by repurposing a piece of foam (that came with a laptop case), cutting it down to size and slapping on some fuzzy-side Velcro. I quickly realized there were too many of the small pedals for practical use--so I have set it aside as a backup nano-board for the acoustic or the bass.

I then realized I really wanted full-sized wah and volume pedals, and I use them pretty frequently in my playing. Hence, I decided to mix-and-match my current pedals, partially upsetting the initial creative vision I had for a fully-nano sized board. Two more revisions led to this board:



This is a Pedaltrain Junior board outfitted with the following signal chain:

Xotic SP Comp
Budda Bud-wah
Xotic EP Booster
Xotic SL Drive
Cmatmods Signa Drive
Ernie Ball VP Jr
TC Electronic Flashback Mini
TC Electronic Polytune Mini (to mute the signal when I change TonePrints with my phone)
Earthquaker Devices Dispatch Master
TC Electronic Ditto Looper
Palmer PDI-09
All pedals are powered by a Diago Powerstation, and I repurposed a Fisherman's Friend tin as a pick/ear buds tin. I'll definitely be bringing this on a field test at the next service, and I'm excited to hear what happens!


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