Mark….
With the exception of one pedal in my mix, I always secure pedals with velcro. There are varying degrees of quality in velcro as well. I've used, for years, an "industrial strength" (draw your own conclusion here! 🙂 ) from Lowes. Some of the board manufactures or supply sites for boards on the web also offer decent velcro.
I did remove the rubber surface from the bottom of my Timefactor and Modfactor to allow the velcro to adhere to pedal itself. That's it….
As far as pedalboards….. do some research on the web. You have a number of options, but make the key choice on how you plan to use the board. You can purchase boards in flight cases with heavy plywood frames, in varying sizes, but these will be heavy once you fill the board up and can take quite a beating if you're gigging a lot. My large board weighs about 80 pounds.
Not quite at that extreme are boards from Pedaltrain. These are aluminum frames, that come in various sizes, and you can purchase them with a gig bag or a lighter weight flight case. Both durable, just depending on how you plan to travel with the case or rough you are on your gear. A nice benefit to the Pedaltrain boards is they ship with brackets that allow you to mount a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power under the board. Provides power to your pedals without taking up real estate on your board. Many boards have similar options…. the Pedaltrain board is just configured, ready-to-go.
A couple things I would recommend, that aren't inexpensive options, but sure make for a clean working install…. consider a power supply, like the Voodoo Labs Power Pedal. Also look into George L's solderless connectors. You can purchase the wire and ends seperately… http://www.stompin-ground.com is a good resource I've used for these. You can custom build your cables to accommodate the configuration of your board…. and you can fix cable issues on the fly in minutes. They are a breeze, reliable, and take up minimal real-estate on your board between pedals. There is some debate on using a Voodoo Lab's power suppy for your Eventide's. Having three, if you plan to mount all of them, isn't going to work with a power brick either. Typically these bricks, like the Voodoo, only have support for two pedals with high power requirements. I avoided this issue and mounted the Eventide power bricks to the underside of my pedal board. Zip tie's are your friend for this. Eventide will only warrant the pedal by use of the power supply shipped with the pedal. Not worth the risk for me personally, with $400 pedals.
Lastly…. while you're at Lowes or Home Depot getting velcro…. pick up some narrow zip ties and the plastic stick-on retainers that you can use with the zip tie straps. You can bundle up your cables on the board and anything that sits below the board, power cables possibly, you can secure to the underside of the board.
Taking these steps will help ensure your board works flawlessly, everytime to you need it. It works…. I've played a lot of gigs with my boards and rarely have had an issue.
Wish you well putting yours together.
– Keith
