John Hendow

The various parts and pieces for my pedalboard project are arriving. The only remaining items are those coming from Keeley and I expect to have them next week. I’ve made a few minor tweaks to my design based on some research:

1. The A/B box will be simplified. Rather than shorting the unused inputs to ground I’m just going to leave them as open connections. I don’t have enough data on my wireless receiver to determine whether it would be negatively impacted by shorting its output. I don’t expect any noise to be introduced by this device when it’s not connected so there shouldn’t be any loss here. One of the impacts of this design revision is that I didn’t need to use a 3PDT footswitch and could have gone with a DPDT instead. Oh well.  I always have the option to rewire this box in the future.
2. After some research, I’ve decided to use my Ernie Ball volume pedal as a second controller for my Pod XT Live. It appears this pedal can be used a substitute for the dedicated Line6 expression pedal, and it’s vastly superior in terms of build quality. I happen to have one and was considering using it in my new pedalboard setup, but was concerned about the loading characteristics of the passive volume potentiometer. I received some good suggestions from my friend Kris, and from pedal customizers. Everyone suggests that a buffer might be a good idea to minimize the sonic impact of the Ernie Ball pedal. But if I use it as a controller rather than as a volume pedal, this isn’t an issue. I will need to experiment with the Pox XT Live to ensure this works as expected.

This weekend I’ll solder up the A/B box and hopefully come up with some kind of crazy paint / decoration job for it. By the middle of next week I should be ready to rock with all my new pedals.