My pedalboard journey

I’ve always been fascinated by effect pedals. Something about transforming a sound signal through the usage of these little analog boxes has always been something almost magical to me. So, the first couple of years of me playing electric guitar I inmediately began to dream about owning tenths of them.

BUT, it didn’t start like that, at least the thing with individual pedals. In 2014, my dad gifted me a guitar multieffects processor for my birthday: the Line 6 POD (aka, everyone's favourite beginner multieffects unit). It was an absolute joy to play, as it introduced me to the world of guitar effects. It had delays, reverb, choruses, flangers, you name it. Perfect for that 11 year old me. For some reason I never cared about the amp modeling (which famousy the POD sucked at), so I only got pure joy out of that big red bean shaped machine and was the perfect entry point.

My first guitar effects: the MXR Analog Chorus and the Boss DD-7

So anyways, back to single pedals. When I sold “the bean” with the idea of going single effects, I firstly wanted a distortion pedal, which turned to be the MXR Distortion III, but that was without any apparent reason other than it looked cool and it kinda sounded like a distortion. But that actually was never my first pedal. My interest began to shift over to more ambient-esque guitar tones, and I wanted to replicate the sound of my favorite guitar player of all time: David Gilmour.

It was 2017, and I was absolutely obsessed with guitar pedals. I listened to hundreds of pedal demos, and I decided that my first two pedals should be the Boss DD-7 and the MXR Analog Chorus.

2018 would mark my first time traveling abroad since 2007, and the place would be the US. I dreamt so much of visiting the great guitar stores such as Guitar Center and Sam Ash (RIP), and my dream would be finally come true on January. So there, my pedalboard journey oficially began.

And the day arrived! As we entered the Kendall St. Guitar Center in Miami, my dream came true. A wall of guitars waved at me, so the pedal corner did. As a 15 year old, I obviously did not bring much money, but it was enough to justify at least a pair of effect pedals.

I remember almost changing my mind the moment I saw a MIM Nashville Telecaster in a beautiful sunburst finish in the used gear corner. It was like $305, but then I said to myself that I could not deviate from my “mission” to buy my first pedals, a sort of goal I had set myself back in Chile. Also, I would run the risk of the airport just taxing me for bringing an instrument, so I abstained myself. Not gonna lie, but I regret a little bit not buying it as I would have had a higher end guitar instead of my current Squier Tele, but at the end of the day it’s just a guitar.

Then, I got hold of a 2003 Electro Harmonix Big Muff that I didn’t know my dad had, and THAT was really a chonker of a pedal. Later in 2017, Electro Harmonix released a reissue of the obscure “Sovtek Green Russian” Big Muff in a small military green enclosure… so I gave back the OG Big Muff to him and bought the reissue.

It is not a surprise that at this point I was spending serious money on effect pedals (at least for a 15 year old), but it was something that gave me so much joy. The next addition to the lineup however, would be quite an important one.

I was DEEP in the “Gilmour theory”, and I frequently spent time reading resources such as gilmourish.com, which is a tremendous work made by Bjørn Riis (guitarist of norwegian band “Airbag”). During that deep reading I became aware of compressors, whose function works like a secret tool of some sorts. Probably nobody in an audience would notice the presence of a compressor, but I learned it is such an important tool for giving definition and attack to my guitar playing. So, naturally I began to dream about owning one.

During the 80’s, Gilmour used the Boss CS-2 intensively, era when he had some of his best guitar tones, especially talking about clean ones (being the compressor+chorus+delay one of my desired tones). The other thing that was tempting me to adquire a CS-2 was that it sounded less “clinical” than modern day compressors, which are characterized by having a rather "true-to-your-signal” response, making them sound a little bit brighter as a result of the more modern circuits. Even though their response is more faithful and “scientifically correct”, the CS-2 circuit sounded a little bit warmer in comparison to it’s CS-3 succesor.

It may sound that I inherited that perception from reading too much forum discussions rather than actually listening or playing the pedal, but I must confess that one big reason of me wanting to have a vintage CS-2 was simply the experience of trying out older gear. And guess what, to this day it haven’t failed me and I love the pedal.

Later down the road, I received probably one of the most “random” pedals that I’ve owned: the Boss AW-2. My dad found it when we were doing some renovations in the house and decided to give it to me. Even though it is a perfectly fine pedal, I played with it for some months, but couldn’t find a reasonable sound. Because I’m not a big fan of the wah sound, I sold it. Speaking of wah pedals, remember that Vox V845 that I mentioned earlier? Yes, it was also sold for that same reason. That money helped me to fund one crucial part of the pedalboard: umm, the pedalboard itself.

During the pandemic I decided on finally getting one as I was growing tired of having my pedals thrown around in a drawer. My goal was to have a modular, but solid board that I could bring anywhere I wanted with a hard case. The chosen one was the Rockboard (Warwick) Quad 4.1. Again, I chose that because it was on sale with the hard case, but one big reason of choosing Rockboard instead of Pedaltrain (which is the big pedalboard maker) was that the first one is not a rail design, instead it is a

Sometime later, I apparently happened to have some noise issues with the Big Muff (Green Russian) and the Boss CS-2, so I purchased from Amazon a cheap noise gate pedal to help mitigate some of the noise. I did work I guess, but at that moment I kinda came to the realization that if I wanted to have a good Big Muff tone, noise supressor should not necesarilly be used. It removed quite a lot of the sustain and it overall was not a definitive solution. I still have the Donner Noise Killer, but it now lives in the other, more recent pedalboard that my dad and I built.

After that, I sold my first pedal: the MXR Analog Chorus. It was a fantastic pedal, but for some reason I never truly resonated with the MXR. To this day, it has been the only pedal that I sold “just because of”. Since that, I established a policy that forces myself to the fact that if I’m selling a pedal, it only can be for another pedal. To be honest, nowadays I believe that it isn’t worth selling effects, as they only get deprecated with time (there are exceptions of course) and the possibilities of new sounds they give you exceed by far the numeral price that you receive when selling.

At some point, I also ended up selling the DD-7 because I didn’t really like the physical interface (too crowded) and I became aware of the TC Electronic Flashback 2, which is far more versatile and it sounds great. It’s also got the “MASH” functionality, that allows you to use the footswitch as an expression pedal and finally, it allows you to save presets in shape of “Toneprints”.