Pedaltrain Novo 18 & Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Review!

Today is my favorite day - new gear day. Not new guitar day, but new gear day. Today we're going to talk about pedal boards. I have this old one that my dad made - a really cool story that I'll get into. But I just got some new stuff from Sweetwater, and I'm really excited about it. So let's dive in.

Pedalboard Introduction

A little backstory about my pedalboard: my dad and I made it when I was like 17, 18, 19, sometime either in high school or college. And I had maybe seven pedals, you know, all Boss pedals - like the DD-3 or DD-7, the DS-1, and a Crybaby wah. So I had to have one that was a little bit longer for the wah pedal, and then I wanted the other two to be on the sides, one a little bit higher than the other four, just so it'd be easier to press on these top ones and the lower ones, you're not doing the pedal dance.

Actually, I have my board with me, a pretty simple setup right here. But as you can tell, right now it's a volume pedal, and then these are a little bit up higher than these so I can easily hit that one and hit the tuner, hit the looper a little bit easier. Anyways, this thing rocks. You can tell it's covered in vinyl. The bad part about it - it's 21 pounds, and if you're anything like me, you know, right before a gig, you don't want to deal with carrying a bunch of stuff, right? It's 21 pounds, it's a lot to carry from the back of the room to the stage if you're on a multiple band gig or just carrying it around in general.

So me and my dad built this. We built it out of, I think, your average pine, your average plywood at Home Depot. So we bought a couple of pieces of it, and some, I think, some maple, maybe. Maybe it was just plywood or two-by-four maple, I can't remember. Anyway, so we built it out, CAD designed it, and, you know, computer program, made sure all the dimensions were right, then we wrapped it in vinyl, which is really cool, added some hardware, the locks, the bottom parts that have like the rubber feet or whatnot, and then we put a little handle on there. So you had the boxes, which you just saw there, and then we had a lid that had a handle with the clasp together so you can carry it around with the lid.

In college, it was awesome because I didn't carry it around that much, it pretty much stayed in the same spot. But the lid got really gross being in those fraternity party basement, and it just ruined the top, so I threw that away. I kept this one now, I'm still lucky, but it's time, it's time to upgrade. And now that I'm playing out a lot more, I'm going a lot more shows with them, now that I don't have the lid, it's harder to carry because you get the guitar one arm and pedal board on the other. And if you know anything like this backpack, the backpack guitar cases, they're great, right? But unless you get the right one, your guitar is always going to hit the top of the door sill. So I try to use my hard case. I'm carrying the hard case for this one. It's hard to carry that pedal board underneath your arm.

Unboxing New Pedalboard

For new gear day today, we have a brand new pedal board - the Pedaltrain Novo 18 that I bought at Sweetwater. So let's get checking it out, getting the knife, and here we go, let's see what we have here.

First up, we have the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2. These are fantastic power supplies, isolated outputs. That's what you really want. If you don't have isolated outputs, your tone sucks, which I'm sure you've heard of, or your signal can get a little weaker. So these, this is the best in the business. All my friends play them, a lot of professionals playing. So Voodoo Power Power Supply. We got the Pedal Train Voodoo Labs mounting kit brackets and as and as you can probably have guessed, the Pedal Train Nova 18. This one's sweet, it's long enough for both my wah pedal and my volume pedal and all my other pedals. So today, we're going to build my new pedalboard. We'll go from a before and after, and maybe at the end, we'll throw some tones just so you can get an understanding what I'm running through. So I'm really excited about this, hope you guys are too.

So one of the really cool things I love about Sweetwater is they give you a bunch of swag, some stickers, as you can tell, my monitors, they're covered in stickers of brands I like. Also, five free issues of Premier Guitar Love magazines. Guitar magazines are the few magazines that I still read that aren't online. I have Guitar World, I've probably had the subscription since I was like 12. Love this stuff. And last but not least, candy. So, with that in mind, let's get started on the build. Check it out.

Installing Pedals and Wiring

So attaching your power brick to your pedalboard's a little tricky. First, you want to remove the housing screws and then put on the brackets like so. Then take the screws, put them through the bracket eyes, and screw them back to the housing, and you should be good to go. So now your brick's ready to go. First, flip your board over, take a pencil or screws and mark where you want them to be. Take a drill and pre-drill the holes where your screws are going to go. You want to drill that's a little bit smaller than the screws and then screw in the screws by hand. It's going to be a lot easier for you if you screw them in by hand and not using a drill, trust me on that one.

All right, so now the board's ready, flip it back over, and make sure your pedals are nearby. Let's switch over to the phone cam. As you can tell, here's the phone cam, the pedals are right next to me on the right. Those are the ones that we're going to be adding onto the board. So let's get started. First, let's take the biggest pedals that you have because those take up the most real estate. Find a place for them and then start adding your other pedals. Usually, I like to do them by the order of the chain, though the chain will change ultimately, and as you'll see in our final video, or the final shot of the board is that I moved things around significantly, I didn't like how they ended up. Now, once you have your layout kind of set up, take the patch cables and start wiring them. Make sure that your cables will work and fit. Normally, you'd get new patch cables and the kits that you can have any length that you want, I recommend those. These are just the ones I had lying around. I'll do another video about adding customized and bespoke, as we have to say, patch cables that will properly fit your board. But whatever you have lying around works for now.

Until next time, let the music play.