This is my pedalboard. This along with an amp is what I use to get the sounds I want and need when playing guitar onstage. The way it works is I play something on my guitar, the guitar sends a signal through cables to the pedalboard, the signal then runs through each pedal on the board getting morphed, shaped, and manipulated accordingly. After running through the pedals, the signal then goes to the amplifier which has a microphone set up in front of it. The signal then goes from the mic, to the soundboard, and then finally to the house-speakers which is what the general public hears. It takes every part of this chain working fully for it to sound good; when one thing isn’t functioning properly, the whole sound suffers.

January 18, during the last Heart of Worship event, I noticed that my guitar started sounding different, and not in a good way. I brushed it off as a fluke thing, “it must have been a power issue” I thought and didn’t think anything of it after. The next time I pulled out my gear and set up for a service, I noticed that it sounded terrible. There was no volume, everything sounded flat and had no depth. After some time-consuming tweaking, I was finally getting a good sound out of the gear, but I was still frustrated at the issues that were surfacing. The next time I set up the gear, sound check for the Easter service, everything sounded worse than ever. But after a lot of huffing, puffing, tweaking, and maybe a few other words ending in “ing”, I was able to get a workable tone that got used for the service. Afterward, I had no choice but to take everything to my laboratory, (my house), and find out why and what was causing my guitar to sound so dull, (known as tone sucking). I think that it might be helpful to draw you a picture so you have a better idea of what I’m describing.

At first, I thought the problem was with the guitar itself. But I ruled that out after playing through a different setup with the same guitar and it sounded great. Next I thought it was the Route 66 pedal, (the upside down house looking one). So I took all of the pedals off of the board, which were all attached to the board via industrial strength velcro, and disconnected them from one another. But before I tested out each pedal individually, I plugged my guitar directly into the amp, giving the purest signal possible to the amp; it still sounded bad. I came back later and played around a little bit, plugging the guitar directly into the amp, this time, it sounded better. I looked and noticed that I was using a different cable than I had been using. I plugged in the old cable: bad sound. I plugged in a different cable: good sound. “AH-HAH!” The cable that had been running from my guitar to the pedals wasn’t working properly anymore and was thus sucking a large amount of tone away.

Relieved that I had found the cause of the tone-sucking, I then proceeded to kick myself for not checking the cable before I completely dismantled my setup and thus have to go through the labor of re-sticking everything and connecting them, running cables over stuff, under stuff, and into stuff.

The moral of the story is this: always make sure to check your cable connections before doing a complete overhaul on your setup. You can most likely change a few words to apply this lesson to other areas, but I’ll leave that part up to you. I have to get back to reapplying the pedals to the board.

and get a new cable
d

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 12:10 am and is filed under Gear, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.