Latest news with #pedalboard
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joe Bonamassa might be the king of vintage gear – but most of his pedalboard is off the shelf
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Joe Bonamassa's penchant for acquiring high-end vintage electric guitar gear and his in-depth knowledge of how to best use his gear is no secret. That makes his humble pedalboard – which is largely made up of off-the-shelf stock – more surprising. Built largely from standard-issue pedals acquired from US music giant Sweetwater, it's a 'board that anyone with a modest budget can recreate, and he's lifted the lid on some of his pedal picks in the new issue of Guitarist. '[They're] standard issue,' he confirms when asked about his relatively straightforward stompbox setup. 'I buy them out of Sweetwater.' There are a few outliers among the bunch, though, but nothing that compares to the sheer exclusively of his wider vintage guitar and amp rig. 'There's a Tube Screamer that is either an '80 or an '81,' he says of his chosen TS, similar examples of which are circa $400 secondhand. 'A Micro Pog ($245) and a Fuzz Face ($170) that goes through the [Fender] Twin [amps]. Then the switcher and the wah and the Fulltone [Supa-] Trem ($279) and a Way Huge Conspiracy Theory.' The latter is a Klon copy that Bonamassa collaborated on. At the time of its launch, he said they were 'virtually identical' to the real thing, and the $189 units sold out in double quick time. Elsewhere, his Silver Jubilee Marshall heads are partnered with a now-discontinued Hughes & Kettner Rotosphere, which he's called 'a fake Leslie [speaker]'. They fetch around $400-600 on the secondhand market. That sits alongside an interchangeable Boss DD-2 delay (circa $200 secondhand). Boss' DD-2 delay was released in the early '80s but was later replaced by the DD-3, which is readily available and costs $154 brand new. Second-hand DD-2's are also affordable. It's an uncharacteristically modest 'board, especially when one considers it's often paired with what Bonamassa has described as 'the world's most expensive three-channel amp.' Nevertheless, it's an encouraging development for those wanting a little JoBo flavor in their own live rigs, but who have just a fraction of his budget to spend. The other non-standard pedals are also replaceable with Sweetwater stock – the Rotosphere could be swapped out for a TC Electronic Vibraclone ($99) or a Strymon Lex ($349), for instance, and a contemporary Ibanez TS808 costs just $169. 'The rest of it's just junction boxes,' Bonamassa expands. 'Inputs for the amps, and a junction box to get to the switcher and out, and then there are the two boxes that power everything.' His rig rundown comes after he broke down his best gear-buying advice with the Guitarist. Choosing the right amp for your next gig, he says, can come at a cut price, while he says players shouldn't let external pressures influence what electric guitar they splash the cash on. 'At some point in time, we may have to get our head around the fact that these things we trade will be worth absolutely nothing,' he says. 'If you're sitting on the couch and you can't stop grabbing a guitar, it doesn't matter what it says on the headstock. It doesn't matter how much you paid for it.' To read Bonamassa's full chat with Guitarist – in an issue that also includes features with Elliot Easton and Chris Buck – pick up a copy from Magazines Direct.
WIRED
07-05-2025
- WIRED
D'Addario XPND Pedal Power Battery Kit Review: Get Juiced
Daydreaming about the perfect pedalboard is a favorite pastime for most guitarists. Cooking up grandiose plans about sculpting the perfect tone is easier than ever thanks to virtual pedalboard builder sites like Pedal Playground or Pedalboard Planner, and big-name pedalboard manufacturers like RockBoard and Temple Audio are in on it as well. Highfalutin fantasies about elaborate setups with stereo trickery and MIDI switchers usually crash to earth when the unsexy work of wiring everything together gets in the way, and a few stripped bolts, gunky piles of velcro, and mysterious noises in the signal chain are enough to drive any tone purist to trade it all in for a digital modeler and be done with it all forever. Photograph: Parker Hall Soldering your own audio cables is one way to eliminate clutter, but that's only half the battle when it comes to wiring a pedalboard. Powering your pedals is the other half, and unless you're an electrical engineer or a maniac who doesn't mind accidentally frying a $1,500 amp modeler with shoddy wiring, you're probably in the market for a plug-and-play power solution that's easy to stash under your board and forget about. Space-saving solutions like daisy chains are subpar due to their typically low amperage and high levels of added noise, rendering them useless if you're using anything more sophisticated than your garden-variety Boss or Electro-Harmonix dirt pedal. If you're averse to noise you'll need a larger, more expensive unit like a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power or Strymon Zuma to power modern amperage-chugging effects like big box reverbs, delays, or multi-effects pedals. D'Addario is here to save the day with its XPND kit, which offers a customizable daisy-chain-style power supply that gets its juice from a USB-C power bank. The Long Island–based manufacturer is already a household name thanks to its quality guitar strings, and recent dalliances in the pedalboard tech market—most notably the XPND series of adjustable pedalboards—have made quite the splash with guitarists who need quick and reliable options in a space that's lousy with disposable Temu junk and expensive, over-engineered prosumer gear. Using all-purpose power banks to power pedals isn't exactly new, but even the most high-end options falter when they're tasked with powering hungry digital effects and modelers. None of them offer such a unique twist on the process of chaining one pedal with another. Cleaner Lines Photograph: Parker Hall The main ingredient in the kit is a black and red power supply cable with eight 9-volt adapters that unscrew at the top. You can loosen the screw to slide the adapters around the cable, or you can unscrew the adapters completely to remove them from the cable and reattach them as needed. This eliminates clumps of extra cable between pedals that are packed in tight, and frees up spare cable to run above, below, and around your board to reach pedals in all places. The cable worked its way across my Temple Audio 24 Duo a total of two times, and the bare cable itself easily slid down below through the perforations in the board to stay out of the way between pedals.
