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43-Inch EVH-Inspired MIDI Pedalboard: Routing, MIDI Setup and Build Lessons
Partway through planning this MIDI pedalboard, we found out the noise gate we'd built the chain around wasn't the version we thought it was. There are two versions of the small Decimator. One has a key input, and one is just in and out. Ours was just in and out.
That's what a large pedalboard build is like. You can plan it very well and there are still little decisions waiting for you. This one's a 43-inch, EVH-inspired board for a customer named Russell, built by Tyler in our Ohio shop. It's a kitchen sink board, and I mean that as a compliment: you can see every pedal, reach everything, and switch most of it with MIDI. Below I'll walk through the signal chain, the MIDI setup, where we changed course, and what you can borrow for a build at home.
Signal chain on an EVH-style pedalboard
Tyler's chain starts with a Digitech FreakOut. If you've never played one, it's a niche pedal that creates a feedback effect without you standing in front of your amp. Amp sims don't feed back. A Marshall 412 stack does. The FreakOut fakes that environment. Whether it lives on your board or just gets patched in when you want it comes down to how you play.
Next is an MXR CAE wah, and then everything runs into the EFX Mark 6, a switcher from MusicomLab. Past the switcher, the signal goes through the amp, a line out box, a Parallelizer 2 and a cab sim, and ends up at the effects returns of two other amps. A couple of Temple modules on the side of the board handle the trips on and off it.
What's inside the EFX Mark VI: all 12 loops
The EFX Mark VI is a 12-loop switcher, and here is what sits in each loop:
Loop five is where it gets fun. The DPC Micro takes up one loop on the EFX but has three loops of its own, holding an OCD, a Duke of Tone and a Timmy. Tyler raised it so Russell can hit those loops with his foot, and it's MIDI controllable too, so program changes or CCs can call up whatever combination he wants. Loop eleven goes to the amp, and loop twelve is the Analog Man Big Boy chorus, which is one of the biggest pedals on the board behind the switchers and the treadle-style pedals.
Where to put a noise gate: wrapping the gain
Loop eleven is the one with the most going on. It sends to the front of the amp through a Temple module, and the amp's effects send comes back through the module and onto the board. Here's the noise gate lesson that came with it.
Plenty of gates have a key input. You send from the gate into your first overdrive, through all your gain, into the amp, and from the amp's send back to the gate's return. Now the gate is wrapped around everything noisy, preamp included, and once you leave the gate you head into modulation and wet effects. If your gate doesn't have that loop, you put it after the noisy section instead. Ours is in and out only, so it goes after the amp's effects send, after the preamp gain and every gain pedal before it.
You're not really worried about noise while you're playing. With the board set up properly, the signal to noise ratio is high enough that you won't notice it when the guitar's pushing through. You notice it when you stop. That's the job.
After the gate comes the boost, a Creation Audio Labs Mk 4.23. Tyler put it way up front in the layout, and there's a reason. When several devices share one loop, the ones you only switch on once and leave, like the gate, can go anywhere. The ones you stomp on and off mid-song need to be reachable by foot.
Ground loops, the ISO out and a line out box
The EFX has a left output, a right output, and a separate isolated output. The ISO out is ground isolated, and you can have it mirror any loop's send, which is handy if you want a dry or dedicated output in the middle of a chain. Here, the left out and the ISO out both run to a Temple module. Russell uses the left out into his amp's effects return. If he ever hits a ground loop, he can swap to the ISO out and lift the ground there.
Then it gets more fun. The amp's speaker out goes into a SIR line out box. The box finishes the speaker connection, so the amp still drives its cab, and sends a signal back to another Temple module on the board. SIR makes one, Bray makes one, and there are probably others. It takes the speaker output through a transformer, splits it, and attenuates it so it's safe to bring back to a pedalboard.
What you're sending is the amp's preamp and power section, the whole sound. It's the same idea as the 80s and 90s rack rigs, where a preamp fed a bunch of different places, and it works with amps that have effects loops and amps that don't. At the end of the chain you can go to a power amp and cab. I've also had good results feeding the input of a clean pedal platform amp like a Fender Twin. A heavily gained amp won't sound as good there, so you're not stuck with a power amp only.
In my limited experience, line out boxes take some testing and tweaking to sound right. They're a handy tool and they're not expensive. I think the SIR is around 150 and the Bray is a bit less. Both have a ground lift.
Parallel wet effects with the Parallelizer 2
This is my favourite section of the board. The Parallelizer 2 splits your signal to up to three devices that run in parallel. You can kill the dry, switch each device on and off independently like a switcher, and control it over MIDI. Here it feeds a Micro Pitch, an SD3000 and a Ventris, sending mono and returning stereo. Order doesn't matter because they're in parallel. Set the loops to kill dry and you're good.
The original couldn't do a stereo send and stereo return. It was a mono send and a stereo return. The Parallelizer 2 can do stereo both ways per loop, though you often won't need it.
You wouldn't normally run something like a Micro Pitch in parallel with those effects, but that doesn't make it wrong. We tested it early on and that was the sound that worked. If it's more of a chorus-style job for you, you can run it before or after the parallelizer instead, which is where I'd typically put it. Micro Pitch is one of those fringe effects that can live in a few spots. Experiment and see what you like.
From there the signal goes stereo into a Temple amp mod, which is a speaker cab sim, and then out to the effects returns of two other amps.
Expression pedal control with the Trash Panda Duel
Russell's main priority for expression was the PolyBlue octave, which only takes an analog expression input. No MIDI. So a dual expression pedal goes into a Trash Panda Duel, and the Duel has two expression outs. One goes to the PolyBlue and the other goes to the switcher. With presets and MIDI, he gets both.
That's the leg up over something like an Expressionator: the MIDI control. And because the Duel uses digipots, it can do more than follow a pedal. Sine waves, square waves, things set to a clock. Something like the PolyBlue, which only has an analog expression input, can now be driven by automated waveforms. Most people won't need that. If you like making weird sounds you couldn't get otherwise, it's a fun one to look into.
How to set up a MIDI pedalboard chain without latency problems
This was the biggest unforeseen thing on the build, and it's the part you can apply at home. Think about MIDI in tiers, and try not to go deeper than five, six at most. A MIDI splitter lets you spread devices out sideways so you only go one tier deeper, instead of daisy chaining everything in series.
Series is like a pedalboard, one pedal feeding the next. Every MIDI device in series adds a little latency,
which means your commands arrive a little late. With a few devices it doesn't matter. The longer the chain
gets, the worse it is, and eventually it glitches. Only certain messages make it through, or none reach the
last pedals. A MIDI splitter is a cost-effective way to keep a MIDI chain reliable.
Here's Tyler's chain. An external controller with very specific presets comes into a Temple module on the
board. It hits the EFX Mark 6 first, then the Parallelizer 2 in series, then a CME MIDI Thru 5 splitter under
the board. One input, five outputs: the Trash Panda Duel, the DPC Micro, the Micro Pitch, the SD3000 and
a MIDI plate out. The SD3000 passes MIDI on to the Ventris in series, so we're four tiers deep at the most,
and everything else sits in tier three. The CME is USB powered, and Tyler runs it from a USB-C tap on the
Canvas power supplies.
Tyler had five splits and six or seven places to go, so it came down to priorities. The Trash Panda Duel and
Micro Pitch only take MIDI in, so they each needed a split. The DPC Micro could have passed MIDI out,
but that didn't make sense for the layout. The Parallelizer 2 has MIDI in and out, so running it in series was
the obvious call.
There's a future-proofing bonus too. Some devices do have a MIDI out, but using it means building an
awkward custom cable where one jack takes the MIDI in and sends it out. If you ever swap a device, good
luck. Splitters avoid all of that. Big fan.
Pedalboard cable management: clean cable channels on the underside
The question we get most: how do you get clean cable channels, and do you know every channel before you lay the first cable? Tyler starts with power. DC cables are small enough that you can layer things over them, and layering audio on top of DC isn't a noise problem. So the power supplies go in first, in the most out of the way spot. He likes how low profile the Canvas supplies are. The catch is that the low profile means the AC power lives in a separate unit, so there's a big power block in the centre right of the board. That's one more pedal to account for in the layout.
Keep your AC lines from crossing your audio lines. A Temple power in module runs along the back edge at
the top right, curls down and over to the block, and any cable that has to cross it goes over in a roughly
parallel fashion to keep noise down.
Then keep your entry points to a minimum. Temple's slots aren't large, so only so many cables fit through
each one. With a switcher you'll probably end up with at least two big looms, and two clean looms beat one
jammed one. Be realistic about how many cables fit under a single zip tie anchor.
Why we use Dual Lock instead of Temple plates
You won't see Temple's mounting plates on this board. They send them with their boards and you can buy
extras. If you don't know any better, they're genius, and they work well when there's plenty of room. Once
the layout gets tight like this one, they stop being useful. So everything's on Dual Lock.
The Temple catch is that all those holes leave less surface area for the Dual Lock to grab. Tyler locks
everything down early with plugs in so the layout is right, which means he has to rip a pedal or two up later
to get at the jacks, especially the stacked ones. With less surface area, sometimes the Dual Lock comes
up with the pedal. He's gone through a little more than usual on this one.
On stem count, we use 250 on the board and 400 on the pedal. That's stems per square inch, and it's our
equivalent of hook and loop. It's a really strong hold and it helps when we ship boards back. 250 to 250 lifts
with a little wrist and has more wiggle, especially on small pedals. When Tyler redoes his own board he'll
probably go 250 / 400 under the switcher, since it takes the footswitch pressure, and 250 / 250 for
everything else so it swaps out easier. Most people use too much at first and realise they didn't need it.
Tips for a big pedalboard build
Cut more cable than you think you need, especially with a switcher where nothing goes pedal to pedal.
Tyler ended up two inches short on one run and had to reroute a cable to get the length back. Cable's
pennies per inch, and your offcuts turn into the one and two foot cables you'll want for the next build.
Then frontload the planning. I'm in the middle of a few rack builds and trying to take my own advice: plan it
out way better than you think you need, understand every connection and the signal flow, and don't start
building until you're confident. An extra 30 minutes of planning saves hours of redoing a cable channel. A
rough idea of where your channels will go makes all the difference.
And leave room for error. Tyler did it two ways here. The DPC Micro sits on three 3D printed blocks, partly
because the MIDI plug wouldn't fit next to the wah, since the pedal slants outward as it goes down the
board, and partly to give Russell footswitch access to the loops. The plugs on the switcher needed room
and that bottom cable goes straight down, so Tyler used two of our 3D printed risers under the EFX and
the Parallelizer. They're both MusicomLab so they share a profile, and spreading the risers out gets the
jacks and cables off the board. He's probably too proud of it. I don't think he can be.
Tyler's last job on this one is the DPC Micro, and then there's programming. If you take one thing from the
build, it's that something will change halfway through, so plan well and leave yourself room to deal with it.
Happy building,
Grant
