As I’ve been playing more gigs with Kingfisher I’ve been thinking about how to reduce the time I’m spending on setting up and tearing down. It usually takes me about 35 minutes to get everything plugged in, and 20 minutes to get it all packed away again. Cecilia’s been pushing me to make a pedalboard; what would that look like?
I do have a lot of stuff by my feet:
The key things are the four velocity-sensitive pedals that I use for drums and bass. I’m playing these nearly constantly, and they need to be positioned just right.
The other things are all helpful, though I use them much less. The pedals on the right are for modifying the sound of my mandolin, while the talkbox on the left can apply to the mandolin or my keyboard overlays. I need to be able to turn these on and off while playing, but the ergonomics doesn’t need to be as good.
Here’s what it looks like in context:
There are also other components (usb hub, raspberry pi) that I currently stick to the piano but would move to the floor if I had a good place to put them.
I need to measure to figure out the minimum width I can fit these into, but I think it’s about 26″. I’d really like this to be something I can check for flying with, probably by packing my clothes around it in a regular (<62 linear inches) suitcase.
My normal default would be to figure out the minimum area that would work and use 3/4″ plywood, but that seems like it might be heavier than necessary. It seems like it’s common for people to use metal ones but these would add height. Which isn’t a total dealbreaker, but then I’d need an even taller seat for playing on. I’m also not sure whether the slight angle (usually ~1″ over 1′) would bother me.
I think my ideal would be close to something like this but upside down: metal construction for a good strength-to-weight ratio, but with the stiffening edge coming up instead of going down so I don’t gain a lot of height.
Suggestions?
Nothing to say on pedalboards that you don’t know already, but another question, have you tried optimizing your setup process? 35 minutes feels a bit long. At some point I was doing setup for a band and I got it down to 15 minutes by writing a script, optimizing which steps go together, and practicing.
35min is pretty optimized if I’m starting with “all components loose in a bag”—it used to take me almost an hour. It’s a lot of stuff that needs to get plugged in: https://www.jefftk.com/p/rhythm-stage-setup-components
But setting up a pedalboard so I don’t need to manually connect dozens of things (this post!) is also optimizing the process.