ROCKBOARD Pedalboard Configurator | TPC Part 1

I have a problem and it's not going away. I don't know how to fix it. It seems like when I'm done with my pedal board, I want to reconfigure it. I want to make it tidier. I want to add a new pedal to it. And then I go and I look back at my pedal board and I'm like, but how? What can I do? What can I, what would another pedal even look like on here? And what kind of connections would I even need? Or I just wish there was some kind of a tool that I could use that would help me to navigate through these hardships. And luckily there is. Okay, so what exactly is this tool that I'm talking about that's going to end all of the pedal board building woes? Well, it's actually found on a website by a company named Rockboard. Let's head on over to the website now and I'll show you exactly what I mean. It's super cool. You're going to want to see this. All right. So headed over to the Rockboard website, as you can see, not only is it visually appealing, but there also are a lot of versatile products on here. Products that I think you're going to want to take a look at before we get to the pedal board configurator, which is the tool that's going to solve all of our problems. I've got to show you some of these things. So with each of their pedal boards, they have this sort of slot that's built in on the back of the board. And this could be one or two slots based off of which board that you buy. But with those slots, you can then put in what's called a mod. In this case, we're looking at mod one. This is an all-in-one patch bay that allows you to basically audition pedals without having to add them to your board, undo cables or anything of that nature. And you can put them based off of where they are in this patch bay in different places in your signal chain, which is super cool. Now it goes actually a step farther because with all of these patch bays, you actually have a whole lot of different options. You've got many options. You've got vocals and acoustic options. If maybe you're a singer songwriter, or maybe you have a pedal board that you've built for your acoustic rig, you have all the options here at your fingertips as well. Another thing that I thought was cool was these quick mounts. Now these allow you to screw these to the back of your pedals using a little bit of a longer screw and then attach them to their pedal boards without having to use Velcro. Now that's super cool. Now based off of the fact that these are within the slots, it means that you can move them. There's a little bit of wiggle room to the left and to the right as well. And then something else that they offer that I thought was the coolest thing I've seen in a long time, because this is something that I have personally been looking for and wished that was out there, are the pedal safe containers. So they make these for all a wide variety of pedals and there's a ton of them on their website. But essentially, let's say you have a pedal that maybe you have dialed it in but you're afraid if you throw it into a bag or maybe some fancy fingers get around your pedal board and they're like, oh look, knobs, let's turn them. Now this is where I find them useful because I leave my pedal board a lot of times at the church in between services. You know, I couldn't tell you how many times I've come in on a Sunday preparing for practice and I look down at my pedal board and realize that everything has changed. These things would be a lifesaver for me. The ability to actually set it, forget it, and then cover it would be awesome. Now not only does this mitigate the problem of fancy fingers coming in there and wanting to turn on those knobs, but it also keeps dust off of your pedals, which can actually prolong the life of the pedals as well. So when I stumbled across the website, I'm looking at all this stuff and I'm like, oh my goodness, this is exactly what I need. But yet still I was up against this brick wall of, but how am I going to know if their board is going to work with the pedals that I have? And lo and behold, I stumbled upon the board configurator. Now you've got to check this out. Okay, headed over to the board configurator in sandbox mode as they call it. You're loaded with a default pedal board. Now this one here is, actually I can see, this is the quad 4.1 model that's just automatically default loaded. Now I have added a few things here real quickly. I added the rock board mod 3 version 2. This is the one that I really got my eyes on anyway. And then I've got an input source. Mine is set as electric guitar. There's a wide variety of options here. And I'm sending it out to the mixer via XLR. So this is all important because as you're going to see, it allows you to do more than just arrange pedals on a pedal board. So I've already got a pedal board built and I want to show you this. This is what I call the pedal board. And this is based off of their 4.2, the quad 4.2 model. As you can see here, all the pedals that I currently own have been uploaded and they're on here. There are over 10,000 pedals in their database. So whenever you go to search a pedal, it's almost always going to be there. However, I'm that 1% and my pedal was not in there. Imagine that. And it was this Behringer FC 600. Now, the cool thing is if I go to add a pedal and I search it here, FC 600. Now, of course, now it's going to show up because I've put it in here, which is super cool. So if your pedal has not been found, you can actually go in here and suggest a new pedal. You can then create and edit that pedal. So I was able to go to the Behringer website. I found the FC 600 and I found a media kit that they had on there with a high quality PNG file. It had all the specifications as far as the length, the height, and I was able to put my pedal into their pedal board system, which then allowed me to place it here on my pedal board. So now I know exactly what it's going to look like on the pedal board. And I know exactly how all of my pedals are going to look on the pedal board. In fact, let me just show you how easy this really is to add a pedal to the database. So for instance, I'm wanting to add the Donner Eternal Bind. Now, this is a pedal that's very rare. In fact, I believe it's discontinued. So I'm not expecting it to show up in their system. And of course, as you can see, it has not. So here is where I would go through their database, make sure, absolutely sure that maybe there wasn't a misspell or someone entered it in differently, but it's definitely not in there. So I'm going to go ahead and suggest a new pedal. The manufacturer name is going to be Donner. And the name of the pedal itself is Eternal Bind. So now I'm going to click create and edit. And this is where I get to upload the various specifications as well as an image. But first, I'm going to set the category to a delay slash looper. Now I'm going to do a quick Google search and I'm going to find an image on Google that matches the criteria that's needed for the upload of the picture. Okay, I'm going to upload it here and I'm going to crop it to where it's just on the edges. Everything's still in view, all of the inputs and outputs are here. And now I will click confirm. Now here's the cool part, I'm going to hit remove background. And ta-da, the background is gone. Now I'm going to save the cropped version of that. That's going to come out a little wonky at first because it's the default setting for the height, the length, the depth, but I'm going to find that information here on the effects database website. And then I'm going to input the actual width, the depth, the height, and set it to digital as the circuit type. As you can see, I've got various different options here for voltage, current, whether it's battery powered, mains powered. It is a 9 volt pedal and its current is 100 milliamps. It also weighs about a pound. So all of this should be up to speed. Now I'm going to go to the media section where I can either upload a manual for it, a written review, a video review, or a link to the official product itself. I'm going to upload a video review that I did a long time ago. So demo by Home Studio Simplified and here's the link to that review. I'm going to set the language to English and hit back. Okay, now it's time to add some connections to this so that whenever we place it on the pedal board, we will be able to see where the ins and outs are at. So as you can see, I've added a connection, quarter inch jack, and this is the type is set to input. And in order to get this rotated into the desired location that I want it to be in, I can just simply hit the rotation button, whether that's negative 45 degrees or positive 45 degrees until I get to the 90 that I need. All right, and with my inputs selected, now I'm going to start adding my outputs. So as you can see, the Eternal Bind is a stereo delay pedal, so it has two ins and two outs. Okay, so I've selected those as outputs, the others are now inputs, and I'm going to add my power to this. This is a 9 volt DC power supply, so everything should look like it should. Okay, center negative. All right, and there we go. So now the pedal, all of the ins and outs, the dimensions are in there. I've got a review in there as well. And I'm just going to go ahead and the last thing, just update the description in English here to include what all the pedal actually has included. Easy peasy. Now if you've watched any of my previous videos about my current pedal board setup, you'll know that I don't have anything to do with MIDI or a looper. I'm wanting to get into the MIDI into the looper phase of things. I'm wanting to step up my game a little bit. And by getting the Quad 4.2, I'm actually going to be able to add a few more pedals into the chain as well. Namely, the EQ Seeker, the Kaleen Pierce Guy, and this Rockstock Nano Tuner, which I absolutely love. So by doing this though, I can bring this onto the website, arrange it on the board based off of what I want it to look like, and I can navigate around all of this. And you'll notice I can zoom in and zoom out with the mouse wheel. If I hold the mouse wheel down, I can actually just click and drag it around. There's also zoom in and zoom out features over here, as well as sort of a center feature to bring you back where you need to be. If at any time I place a pedal where it may not fit, it's going to give me this little red line right here. That's going to show me that's not going to fit. There's going to be some space constraints there. So I can always just drag that over and fix it. Now here's where it gets cool too, because you'll notice these little nodules here hanging off the back. These are actually inputs. So not only does it allow you to, you know, really look at your pedal board as a bird's eye view, but it also allows you to see how the inputs and outputs are going to look based off of the patch cables that you're using. Now this is, it's mind-blowing whenever you really start to put all this together, because this is not just a toy. It's literally something you can use to plan out your pedal board, someone else's pedal board. I mean, you could do an entire consultation service off of this. So here is where I've named the pedal board. Here's the board model that I'm using. And then just a real quick description text. As you can see, you can put different backgrounds to this. I prefer honestly just the stark white. And then as we go through here, I can check mark these pedals. These are ones that I own. And then maybe if there's one that I want to put on the board that maybe I don't currently have yet, I can actually put that into a category of one that I want to own on a wish list. So here's a couple that I want to add to the wish list. So the ISO PowerBlock V12 IEC. This is by Rockboard and it fits perfectly just underneath their boards. But yeah, there are a host of pedals here that you would be hard pressed not to find the pedal that you own. But even if it's not on here, you can always add it. So now let's go to signal flow because this is where it gets crazy. So here in the signal flow, you'll notice there are green arrows and red arrows. Green indicates in, red indicates out. Now as we scroll through here, you'll also see some gray ones. These are areas where there is nothing going into it at all. Now it's also telling me what patch cables that I'm using to get it from point A to point B. The exact length that I'm going to need to get it from point A to point B based off of where it's at on the board. So I know now based off of that, I need an 11.81 inch cable and a 7.87 inch cable in order to make that happen. So at any time I can duplicate this maybe I want to make some changes. And then if I go into the planning phase as well, I can click on what's called the parts. So by clicking on the parts, it's going to tell me all the pedals that I need, all of the cables that I need, and the length of the cables that I need, what mods that I'm using, and then I can actually print a list of exactly everything that's needed right here. That way when I go to make the board, not only is everything perfectly laid out on the board the way that I want it already in advance, but I also know what kind of cost that I'm looking at based off of my needs. One other thing I wanted to point out, if you go to the power section, so right now I've got the RockBoard ISO PowerBlock version 12 IEC, you'll notice that also if you have uploaded a pedal of your own or if it's within their database and they have the amperage, and they have the amperage as well as the voltage that it takes, you'll also know what kind of power supply you're going to need based off of the voltage. So all of my pedals right now are currently running off of 9 volts, so I know that I don't need a power supply that will provide anything higher than that. Now the PowerBlock V12 does provide more than that, and that's also awesome to be able to have that versatility again to where if at any time you did want to add something to the pedal board that maybe required 12 volts or 18 volts, even 24 volts, you can throw it on there. Also it tells you what milliamps each of those pedals run at. If it has a question mark, you can always go in here, you can research that, and you can actually add it to the pedal and sort of help the community out as sort of an open source style type of offering there. Okay, so this has been a brief overview of the RockBoard pedal board configurator. I think it's going to save you a lot of time and probably even a lot of money. If you want to follow along with me as I build the exact board that you've just seen on the screen today, I would appreciate it if you'd like and subscribe and make sure that you click the bell icon so that every time I do upload a new video, you'll be the first to know. This is going to be the first in a series of videos that I'm going to show you step by step of me putting this board together, testing out some of the sounds. I'm going to include everything, and if you guys have any questions during this series while I'm building this, then please let me know. I think it would be awesome if we could all get involved on this. Okay, that's it for me today. I hope you had a very merry Christmas, and I hope that you had a blessed new year, and may this new year bring you nothing but prosperity, love, peace, and joy. Until next time, remember that we can dream alone, we can even create alone, but together we can achieve so much more.