new pedal board

I have finally put together my new flight pedal board, and I'm pretty jazzed about it. It's pretty ridiculous to have two different set-ups, but I've found it's been a great relief to have one for big shows and records, that can be as big and obnoxious as I want it, and one that's easily portable, light-weight for flights and little gigs around town. The one I'm going to show you is my flight board. And here we go...

This first shot is all the pedals that will go on this board, the power supply and cables. This is how I've been going to the last few shows. I'll be glad to not do this anymore.



This is the empty pedal board. It is a Pedal Train 2, their medium model, and it's sitting on its case. It's a great design. A light-weight steel frame with four slats 2' wide. The board comes with 2' velcro that lines up perfectly on the slats. You then velcro the bottom of your pedals and they stick right to it. The real genius of this board is that you can wire through the slats, keeping some of your longer cables out of the way and under the board. This makes it very easy to sway pedals out, or rearrange your signal flow. They're really a great design, and if you're looking for a pedal board, I couldn't recommend them enough. Anyway, moving on...



Here are the pedals with velcro on their backs.



Now we get to the good stuff. Afer you have them velcroed and you have all your power and audio cables ready, it's time to decide on your signal path. This is VERY important, and something I didn't understand the first couple boards I made. You need to take stock of what pedals you have, what they do to the sound, and then what order they need to be in. Putting different pedals on either side of a delay will provide the best example of this.

My set-up on this is fairly standard, but the tremolo is in a different spot than some might typically use. I start out with the tuner. This has a bypass output and a muting output. The muting on/off output goes directly to the Baggs DI on the other side of the board. This is for an acoustic guitar or mandolin. That way I can use the same cable for every instrument, but I don't have to shut off all my distortions and delays to switch to an acoustic sound. The bypassed output goes to the volume/wah. This is a cool, little pedal I got off ebay for like 30 bucks. The wah sounds great and the volume is very clean and complete, something my other volume has a problem with. I like it's tiny size as well.

From there it goes to the Rt. 66, which is a compressor and an overdrive, which I had modded to be more of a clean boost. Then it goes to the Rat, this one modded for a less-nasally heavy metal sound to more of a seventies distortion, to the Danelectro Overdrive. I had these originally swapped, but since I'll never use them together, and they fit better on the board in this formation, I moved them. Then I go to the tremolo and the Ibanez delay, which is the first pedal I ever bought and still one of my favorites. Then I go to the A/B box. From here on of the sends goes to the "dry" amp. This is considered "dry" because it will have less delay on it.

The other output here goes to the H2O, which is a nice analog delay and chorus. A very great pedal, both sonically and economically. This, and the TU-2 tuner, are the only pedals I have on BOTH my big and little boards. From here the line will go to the "wet" amp. I left some space after this on the board for whatever randomness I decide will be fun to have, maybe a pitch-shifter or phaser, and these would only go to the "wet" amp, as well.



Here is a shot of the wiring underneath the PedalTrain.



and a close-up so you can see the ties that keep it neater and less likely to wear out your cables.



and the same view from the front



Building a pedal board is never easy, and I find I need to believe in myself and go with what my heart says is true to be able to pull it off. That's why I need some encouragement.



Now, the fun part: trying it out!



It sounds great and everything works correctly. The guardian of the Velvet Eagle, the Super-Gorilla looks on with rock approval.



Now I'll fit the board snugly in its case



And it's time to make sure this wasn't all useless. If it weighs more than 50 pounds I'll have to pay an extra amount every time I fly to a gig.



36 Pounds! Awesome. This gives me room for a few more pedals, cables, strings, whatever. Take that American Airlines!!



Also, I can't say enough how you need to have good cables to have good tone. Cheap little plastic deals can cut up to 10% of your volume with each cable you use. If you use seven or eight in a row, you're losing almost 3/4's of your guitar's initial volume. I strongly recommend George L. cable, which is a little more expensive, but so worth it. The George L. comes separately as cables and jacks, and you cut the cable to the length you need and then screw the jacks on the ends. Very hands. Unfortunately, I ran out of George L. today, so I used a couple spare plastic ones, but I will replace them next week. Here are the two different kinds I used today.



Also, and I don't have a picture, but you can see the plug in the shot in the case, a good, cheap power supply is the Visual Sound 1Spot. It's made by the same company as the H2O and Route 66. They're like twenty bucks, and chains that will power 5 pedals are an additional ten bucks each. I am using two chains off one 1Spot on this board. They also make little adaptors for different style jacks, so that it can work with any pedal. I have three different jack styles on this board, and this little guy saved me probably a hundred bucks to power them all. And it's very quiet, unlike a lot of chain-styled power adaptors.

Well, there she is, and I hope you weren't bored to death. As you can see, I really love this stuff. I'm blessed that I get to do my hobby for a living, for sure. I also truly believe that excellence in what you create is a reflection of your Creator, and so I always try to make these work and sound the best they can. It also saves you a lot of headaches later on. Thanks for reading this, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Also, thanks to Geof who told me how to do photos on here. Next up: Invasion of the Baby Pictures!!

insomniac

I should be asleep right now. I fell asleep at around 10:45, which is really, really early for me, then woke up a half an hour later, talked with my wife for a bit, which was really nice, and haven't been able to get back to sleep. I read a bunch more of Steinbeck's Diary of a Novel, or whatever it's called. It's really fascinating. It's a collection of the letters he wrote to his friend each day as his warm-up for writing East of Eden, which is, ironically, the only Steinbeck book I haven't read. I will once I finish this, though. And by then the new Harry Potter should be out, so I have all kinds of good reads to look forward to.

I'd started sleeping better right before Ella was born. I was finally diagnosed as an insomniac and given some medication to help me sleep. I went from getting three or four hours a night, and then crashing for a solid day once or twice a month, to sleeping seven or eight hours and working out in the mornings. That stuff makes me sleep really hard, though, and I need to be able to wake up for feedings and diaper changings and the like, so I stopped taking it. Blah, blah, this must be incredibly boring, but hey, it's the truth.

I picked up my new PedalTrain pedal board this morning, and started putting it together. I'll finish it up tomorrow, and I'm taking a few pictures, because a number of people have asked me different questions about my set-ups. I'll send Geof an e-mail to figure out how to put pictures on here once I've got it done. Then I'll get started on the big one, which will be a much bigger project.

Well, I'm going to go crawl back in bed and see if I can luck out and crash. Oh, and Andy P's show the other night was a lot of fun, by the way. I am the worst bass player in the world, but I haven't had that much fun playing music in quite a while. Good friends, good songs, good times.... Nighty night.

why not?

Tonight I'm playing bass with Andrew Peterson at a show here in Nashville. Should be fun. I'm a terrible bass player, but I badly want to be a good one. I think it's such a cool instrument.

We finished our 24 marathon last night, so now we just have to watch this past Monday's episode, which Clay taped for us, and we'll have seen them all. How pathetic. I have been way too late the past few nights working on the new Caedmon's record, adding guitars and even a bass part, since Jeff is still in even-newer-dad-than-me mode. That was pretty fun. He'll probably replace it before the record comes out, but who knows?

The new PedalTrain pedal boards got in today, and I'm going to go pick one up tomorrow or the next day. I have two different set-ups, the big one for tour shows and records, and the little(r) one for fly dates and little shows around town with whoever. The sad part is, my little one is probably bigger than most people's regular ones, and my big is about to become two seperate halves from TMCases. Anyway, I was hoping to be able to use the new PedalTrain tonight, but I won't have time to get it ready. My big board is the only one functional at this point, and it's just so heavy and I can't wait to get rid of it. It weighs like 90 pounds or something. Maybe I'll just bring a few random pedals and see what happens. That could be fun. It's all about limits. Give yourself some random parameters and see what happens that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Well, I should probably go and grab some junk to throw in the car then, I think sound check started an hour ago.

Mark Heard

I doubt many of you have ever heard of this man, but he's one of my all-time favorite songwriters. He sold very few records, and died in the early 90's leaving not much behind but his family and a pile of incredible songs. Tonight I stumbled across a site that has his complete lyrics and just lost myself reading through them. Specifically the songs on his last three albums, Satellite Sky, Dry Bones Dance, and my favorite Second Hand. Some of his lyrics, especially Another Good Lie, Love is not the only thing, love is so blind, it goes on... are just unreal. I'm sitting here in Ella's nursery just wiping tears from my eyes reading the words of this man that he knew few people would ever read, and that writing them didn't always provide for his family like it needed to. Just amazing. Here's the link:

http://home.no.net/heard/index2.html

I really want to do a cover of his song "I Just Wanna Get Warm" and may work up a version for my next record. It'd be a great rock song.

Oprah, you were wrong

I wrote a new song today, the first in a long while, and that's the first line. My wife got a subscription to Oprah's magazine, "O", and this month a special little booklet entitled "What I Know is True", or something to that effect, came with it. Jason was over here last night and picked it up and started reading little tidbits out to us all. She quoted the Bible verse "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" and went on to say that the definition of truth is "whatever feels right to you in your heart." I started getting mad. Then Jason read things like "love never hurts, it only feels good" and "when things get confused or sad, just look in your heart, and believe in yourself". Man, I was fuming by then.

You see, I've been wrestling with this idea that we all grew up being taught a load of crap about who we are, and that now we are reaping the consequences of it, and we don't even know it. The things I am talking about are phrases like "Believe in yourself", "if you believe it, you can achieve it", "when in doubt, follow your heart". These things sound so good, but have we ever really thought about them? Look over those sentences again. Can you believe that anyone would fall for that? How obviously and deeply wrong each statement is! There are tons of these out there, floating around, but they all pretty much stem from these three, the greatest of these being, of course, "Believe in yourself." I'm going to take a quick minute and explain why I think these are flawed and why I think that matters.

3. "What's true is what you know in your heart"

We have heard this in every movie made for kids in the last twenty-five years, but have we really thought about it? If you look at this from a Christian perspective its fallacy is obvious. The heart of man is not always a good thing, some would argue, and would probably win, that it's NEVER completely a good thing. My heart is selfish, always wanting, never wanting to give, always looking for the things that will make me feel good. What does my heart tell me to do? It tells me to cheat on my wife, to lie on my taxes, to look down on people, to lie, to always be on top. I know that I need to look to something outside of me, something greater than me, to lead me and to tell me what to do.

From a non-christian perspective, I want to know that the people around me are looking to something outside of them as well. I want to know my government is run by people who are not following their heart, but their ideas of right and wrong, justice and mercy. That they will follow the rules of their job, the Constitution, and not whatever they're feeling at the moment. If I'm on trial, I want to know that the "truth" means who really shot J.R., not what somebody thinks might have happened. Truth is not relative in the courtroom. Nor in the business world. Your heart may tell you to turn around and go back to your girlfriend, but you're the pilot of a plane and your passengers need to be going to see their families and doing their jobs. These ideas are romantic in the movies, but chaos in real life.

2. "If You Believe It, You Can Achieve It."

This one probably makes me the most mad, because it is the most obviously untrue. The simple fact is: You can't always do what you want to. When I was in jr. high I practiced for hours a day at basketball. I played ten times the basketball that I played guitar. Guess what? I suck at basketball. I have no depth perception. I have asthma. I barely have enough balance to walk to the kitchen. I can't play basketball. I wanted to join the team at school so bad. I tried out every year. I was never good enough. I guarantee you I practiced harder and wanted it more than most of those kids on the team, but it wasn't going to happen.

On the flip side, I have a job that a lot of people wish they had. I know that. I get cd's in the mail every week and after every show from people who want to be musicians. They feel they have something to offer, and the talent to make it. The truth is: most of those cd's are pretty bad. I hate that, but it's true. I'm very blessed to get to play music for a living, and I know that God has given me the gifts to do that. I also know there are people who want those gifts more than I do, and they flat-out don't have them. No one wants to listen to someone who can't sing in tune. That's why American Idols ratings are down this season. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Some of these people, I know, have worked way harder than I have to create an opportunity for themselves, but it just won't happen.

Why do I think this is a dangerous belief? Because it's so good to hear. It's so encouraging when you're starting out, or discouraged. But it's a lie. A lie is never helpful in the long run. I believe that we, as humans, were created with limits, and that those are a good thing. I'm not saying we shouldn't have goals, I'm not saying we should give up. I'm saying that life is easier when we accept that we won't always succeed, because we won't. We need to realize that there is more to life than failure and victory, especially when we all fail more than we don't.

One of my best friends grew up with very supportive parents, both teachers. They raised him with this belief. He spent years working towards a certain goal that he would never reach. I remember the day he realized it. It killed him. He really believed that what he put his mind to, he could do. But he couldn't. And he could barely believe it. He looked at me, crying, and said, "but I tried so hard. I believed it, how couldn't it happen? It was supposed to happen."

I think that moment is why I have such a hard time with that phrase. It did damage. That lie took years of his life that he probably should have been spending elsewhere, it took him away from his family, and most of all, it broke his heart. Believing in a lie will only hurt when the lie is exposed.

1. "Believe in Yourself"

And this one can only be seen as wrong from a Christian perspective, but it's the fundamental fallacty to all of these statements. I believe that the heart of this movement, of these ideas, is really an evil thing. I believe that we, as humans, were meant to live in harmony with a God who was greater than us, who made all, knew all, and had power over all. HE could do whatever He put His mind to. Our very existence is evidence of that. To put your hope in yourself, to trust that the answers are all inside your heart is really, at its core, a denial of the relationship between God and man. We were created to believe in Him, not in us. In Him, would we find the answers to our questions. In Him, will we find the truth that will set us free. In Him, can we put our faith and trust, can we find rest and peace, can we move mountains.

It's easy to see through a ridiculous lie, through one that insults us or demeans us. It's the subtle lies, the sweet ones, the ones that go down easy, that we fall for. And, like candy to the tooth, over time they chip away at us, reshaping the way the truth really tastes and feels, until we don't recognize it, and fall for an imposter.

It's my prayer that we would start seeing these ideas for what they really are, and stand up to them. I hope that we can live in a world where our hope can be greater than ourselves. These ideas that seem so much more hopeful than the idea of sin and depravity, are really a cancer that grow to choke out a greater hope, one of redemption and perfection. You see, there is no real freedom in lies, but there IS a freedom in knowing who we really are, our limitations and our imperfections, and knowing who we can really put our hope in. This is not a pipe dream or inspirational poster, but a new heaven and a new earth, with no tears and no failings!

Also, no cheesy R. Kelly pop songs where people sing that they believe they can fly when they obviously can't. If he really believed that, they'd lock him up, which I guess they're about to do anyway...