This is a guitar I designed with Moniker Guitars. All components were chosen by me and the spiral design is my own creation. The headstock branding and the word Scarebear on the neck comes from my Scarebear logo.
Sadly, Moniker Guitars is no longer in business.
… Scarebear custom Reedsdale (Moniker Guitars)
So I wrote recently—if you consider a month ago recently—that I’d entered what I’m calling the previous century and provided electricity to my small guitar pedal collection. I was quite proud of this achievement and managed to connect all pedals in random order just to prove all their little lights worked. I’ve now decided to enter the modern era—perhaps even this century—and build my own little pedal board which will put my small pedal collection together in a somewhat sensible order (all with electricity powered lighting of course).
As I am years behind in the ways of pedal boards I have realised I’ll need assistance in the ways of ordering the pedals I have. Luckily I have a few places to source information from. Let me share some of my favourites with you as I prepare to build my first pedal board.
The first place I found useful information on was YouTube. I found a very handy and informative video on pedal placement by the Tone King. This video also made me want to buy more pedals. I am slightly compulsive though.
The Tone King video has made me wonder what would happen if you place two distortion pedals after each other (as opposed to an overdrive and a distortion pedal as suggested in the video). I have a feeling I will discover what will happen because my current pedal collection consists of the following:
To be honest I’m yet to find out if the loop goes at the end. I imagine it does.I’m also very sure the two-distortion combo will just be awful.
Apart from YouTube I did find other information sources on the Interweb such as this Tumblr site on pedal boards. I found it to be very informative. Some of the information seemed very similar to that in the Tone King video. Reassuring.
My last source for information was my iPhone. Not as another searching tool. Not as a way to reach out and phone a friend either. No, I had a look at the preset options in the guitar apps I’ve purchased such as AmpKit and AmpliTube. Surely the pedal placement there was done by experts. I just have to follow their leads (pun intended) to see if my intended pedal placement was appropriate. So far I believe it is.
I have my pedals and I have my single cable to power them all. I’m awaiting my new connector leads (on order) and then I’ll build some kind of framework to house the pedals. It won’t be metal as I’m not a metalworker. It will be as sturdy as I I can make it in wood. Although I’m not a carpenter either.
This is going to be fun!
For many years I would replace the 9 volt batteries in each of the Boss guitar pedals I owned—of which there were three—each time the little red lights began to fade. As I’ve never been in a band or put my pedals through any kind of hard-core torture, batteries used to last me for quite some time. Then my wife and I started a family and I momentarily lost track of my guitar infatuation.
When I came back to the obsession, my Boss DS-1 distortion pedal decided to punish me for the time apart. It used the acid from its battery to commit a form of suicide. I felt bad. But like the evil scientist who refuses to let the dead be, I made the decision to use electricity to power my pedals.
Sadly for me, my budget didn’t allow me to purchase anything new. So I did not go out and get myself several Boss power packs. Nor did I get myself a pedal board (for my huge three guitar pedal collection). Nope. I made the decision to rob a few of my own household appliances of their power packs when it was time to play guitar. That worked quite fine. But you needed a power board to plug the power packs into as each power pack was so bulky.
And for many years I got by like that. I was happy to have come up with a solution that involved spending no money. I had accepted the lazy solution to my initial problem. Until recently when I decided to get myself some of the technology that others had been using for probably as many years as I’ve been alive. Perhaps not that long, but a long time none-the-less!
It’s messy—with more pedals today than I had back then—but it fills me with joy. Today I plugged in my favourite pedals just so I could stare in wonder at all their pretty lights. The pretty lights you can’t make out because I like to strip all images of colour on this website. But it was cool! The order was all wrong and the sound would have been terrible, but I had the power—pun intended—to use all of my pedals at once with just one power pack thanks to my 5 to 1 power cable. All for under $10 thanks to my love of eBay.
One cable that allows my one Boss power pack to power all of my guitar pedal units! Awesome.
Why I’ve had so much fun I might even get myself some new pedal connection cables and build a custom pedal board for my own pedal collection. If I should attempt this project it also would be messy—I’m no carpenter—but I’d like to think it would also be cool.
Stay tuned. Or not.
A while ago I posted this article on my custom-built and twice-hacked website. I put a lot of effort into the website and a decent amount of work into the article. It seemed logical to me to keep at least one of them. So, with minor edits that make the content relevant to this new website, here is the saved article.
… Recording the guitar with an iPhone
Prior to dedicating my Scarebear website to my guitar fascination, I started a small website called 47 Guitars. The aim was to post weekly guitar related articles for 47 weeks straight. I later decided to incorporate that concept into the main Scarebear website instead. The logo for 47 Guitars was intended to represent the guitar subject matter which was achieved by using the plectrum shape.
… 47 Guitars logo