Guitar Pedalboards

Constantine and I began chatting about pedals and pedalboards yesterday, so I thought I'd post my pedalboard and await comments/suggestions. If you have a pedalboard, please post a pic and a few comments about it.

I'm pretty proud of this board, as I built it from scratch (and I'm not a carpenter or handyman). Of course, I had input and help from various friends.

Notes:
- pedals are not in order of signal chain, but rather by the how often I turn them on/off
- Phil Keaggy originally got me hooked on looping 10 years or so, but at present I use the looper mostly for songwriting and practice
- the EHX Bass9 pedal is my secret weapon for throwing in bass guitar in church on the fly, and for recording bass parts onto the looper
- I added the SansAmp about 5 years ago so I didn't have to bring an amp to church and mic it, etc... I love it!
- I added the 1Spots a year or two after I built this pedal and found out the pedal was too shallow to fit the regular power supplies; so it cost a bit more to buy the extra shallow version; and then I had to get 2 b/c it didnt have enough outputs for me; I'm thankful I had some extra cash that year b/c I for sure couldn't afford them now
- I've gone through a handful of delays and overdrives and the ones I have know fit my playing style and genres I enjoy
- I love the Boss Compressor b/c it gives an indicator of how many dBs are being quieted

Wow, yours is so neat and orderly.  My pedal board changes so often because I experiment a lot these days.  
I typically have no more than 4-5 pedals at a time, including a tuner. 

How did you decide where to put the compressor?   I am having problems with the compressor washing out the other pedals that follow it.  But I've always put it early in the chain.  Maybe I need to rethink that.

Constantine wrote:Wow, yours is so neat and orderly.  My pedal board changes so often because I experiment a lot these days.  
I typically have no more than 4-5 pedals at a time, including a tuner. 

How did you decide where to put the compressor?   I am having problems with the compressor washing out the other pedals that follow it.  But I've always put it early in the chain.  Maybe I need to rethink that.

I'm so sorry, Constantine, I missed this post from a few weeks ago.

Like I said in the previous post, I've got 20 years of playing around with my pedalboard. Now that I'm 40+ I pretty much know what I'm using my board for and which pedals I need for that sound. For exampls, I played around with flangers and choruses for about a decade, trying to thicken up my clean strumming. I finally just gave up, recognizing that my electric would never sound like an acoustic (my Fishman acoustic amp has chorus and it sounds beautiful with an acoustic or electric violin). 

I actually do not have alot of experience with compressors, Constantine. This is the first one I've put on my pedalboard, and for aforementioned reasons I love it. However, the specific reason I'm using it is to tame the volume differences in only clean circumstances: 1) strumming and 2) between strumming and picking, 3) picking while using the bass replication pedal. As the only effects I would use after those are delay, I have no problems with sound washing out. 

For ease of use, I often leave the compressor on when I'm using my overdrive pedal. But I usually turn it off with high gain distortion, because it introduces some noise into the signal.

What pedals do you mostly use on your pedalboard? Although I've never tried it on a pedalboard, there could be an argument made for putting the compressor last (like using it on the master channel or during the mastering stage) to smooth out the volume of your final sound.

My compressor is also in my noise gate effects loop to help quiet it down.