You have no items in your shopping cart.
Who a GigRig PedalboardIs Actually Good For
You’ve picked a board with tiers, three rows of pedals, and a rack of patch points on the side. You lay everything out, it all fits, and then you run a cable underneath the middle riser and the whole thing won’t close. Or the lid comes down and crushes the front row of your layout.
Adam built his first GigRig board in our California shop, and he hit a few of these snags. So we sat down on the bench to talk through who this board suits, who it doesn’t, and what he’d tell you before you start building one.
What was on the board
It’s a big, serious rig, and it’s built for stereo. Guitar comes in at the patch points on the side and goes through a Walrus Canvas tuner, a Cali 76 compressor, a few drives including a Kingsley Squire and a modded Boss GE-7, then a Goodwood Audio Audition for inserting an amp preamp, volume pedal or delay with auto-routing. After that it splits into a Microcosm, a Mobius, a Timeline MX and a Big Sky MX, and ends in two ToneX One pedals, one per side of the stereo chain, so you can run different amps left and right.
The last stop is a LongLine, which sends a balanced signal out to front of house. No extermal DI and you still get optional quarter-inch outputs (for amps or FRFR's). A cool thing about this board is that the Audition and LongLine were designed before the GigRig surface existed, and their jacks still line up with the patchbay. Happy accident.
Who it’s good for
If you want a lot of switches in a compact footprint, this is the one. The middle riser has three height positions, and the back riser sits higher again, so you get three tiers: a bottom row, a step up, then another step up at the back.
On a flat board you’re always solving the same puzzle. Which pedals do you need to stomp on, and how do you get them within reach? You push the tall ones back and the low ones forward. The GigRig builds that stepping into the surface, so access is mostly handled for you.
It also suits you if your routing is complex. The side patch points give you plenty of options for inserts, inputs and outputs. If you’re fine with a longer setup, that’s a real advantage.
Who should skip it
If you want to reach every pedal on your board, easily, to switch it on and off or tweak the knobs, this probably isn’t your board. A big part of the appeal is the space underneath, where you hide things that don’t need touching: power supplies, always on pedals and junctions, anything you set once and leave.
If you’re not hiding anything under there, you’re paying the price of the tiers for no benefit. A flat board or a regular angled board of the same size will do the job and be less hassle.
Adam, for what it’s worth, would take a plain flat board every time. He doesn’t want to hide his work and doesn’t want to flip up a riser to reach anything. He doesn’t gig with it, so the bigger footprint doesn’t bother him. I lean the other way, towards angled boards like the Creation Elevation, or the Vertex Gator with a flat front and a riser at the back. Neither answer is wrong. It’s what suits how you play and build.
Why tiered pedalboards are tricky to build
Anything with multiple risers is harder to build on, and the GigRig is no exception. The first thing I tell people about double riser boards is that how the risers mount matters more than anything else. If the middle riser lifts up and the pedals hit the row behind it, you can’t get underneath to fix anything.
Adam found a couple of limits on this one:
- • The risers flip up backwards or forwards, and Adam prefers backwards. But the distance between the two risers is fixed, and you only get about half an inch of play. You have to lift the back riser first to get to the middle one.
- • There are posts that hold the back riser, and they sit right where the Microcosm and the tuner end up. If you push a pedal out as far as those posts, you can’t get in to adjust it.
His advice: if you need to reach stuff under the middle riser, keep those pedals inset so they don’t run out to the posts. On this build the only thing under there was the ToneX amp sims, which you set and forget, so it was fine. Something like the King of Tone you’re switching on and off all night would be a different story.
And dry fit. Put your pedals down around the risers, left and right, and underneath at the front, and check the height clears before you commit to anything - keeping in mind dual lock adds height and cable channels need a safe place to travel! Plan with that in mind.
The lid has boundaries
Tyler learned this on his first GigRig build, and Adam used it. The lid doesn’t go over the front lip. It sits down on the flat surface of the board. So you can’t put anything past the walls, which costs you roughly half an inch at the front. At the back, the lid has a flat part that rests on top of those panels, so nothing can go out there either. They’re hard boundaries. Plan your layout around them from the start, not after you’ve tied everything down.
Build order: do the bottom layer first
This was Adam’s best tip. Do everything on the main surface before you install the risers. Run your cables, mount your anchors, tie everything down, solder what needs soldering. The risers have no screws, so with no cables attached they come off easily. If you tie in the riser cables first, you can’t remove it again, and you can’t get under it to work.
Even so, cable runs underneath will never be as tidy as on a flat board. Getting in there is awkward, and you just have to accept that.
Powering a tiered board
Power was one of the smarter calls on this build. Adam put the Canvas 15 under the middle riser on the bottom layer because the pedals up front don’t fit under there at the middle height with cables running beneath them. He put the Canvas 5 attached to the underside of the middle the riser, so he only needed one extension cable running up to power the five pedals on that tier. That saved a lot of cable clutter on a surface that’s already tight.
I’ve been burned by this one. I once did a layout with a riser where everything fit, then I ran cable channels and the riser wouldn’t close because the channels hit the pedals. Now I check it every time. Do the same.
It’s also useful that the back of the board has easily removable panels, so you can patch power in there, and the Canvas power brick sits right back there.
Powering a tiered board
If you want three tiers in a compact space, complicated routing, and a spot to hide the gear you never touch, it’s a very good board. You’ll just need to be a bit more careful building it. If you want every pedal at your feet with no fuss, a flat board still wins, and Adam’s proof of that.
Dry fit it, check your heights, and build the bottom first.
Happy building, Grant.
