Re: Cornish style pedalboard
I've always liked how Cornish uses the standard circuits from pedals, but transplants them into a common, indestructible enclosure. You can see the OD-1 (tan board) intact but mounted on a generic black control/mounting plate. The T-Rex must be difficult to separate from its case, since he mounted it box and all with its control sticking through the deck.
Cornish has worked hard over the years to solve the problem of broken footswitches. It looks like he gave up on traditional push on/push off stompbox switches and changed over to those giant plastic pushbuttons, which look like they come from the industrial-controls market (my profession). I suspect those green boards with relays on them are the logic and switching needed to convert the buttons' momentary action to push on/push off and to do true bypass, loop switching, etc.
Inspired by Pete Cornish (mostly his early pedalboards for Pat Travers, Andy Summers, and Robbie McIntosh) I started building my own in about 1980. Like him, I use the pedals mostly intact but permanently mount them to the board. Unlike him, I use the pedal cases and mount them on top. Wiring is soldered into the pedals and connected underneath the deck. A homemade 9 volt supply power the whole thing. Special switching (board bypass, tuner, A/B, loops) can be wired right into the board. I don't use special preamps or buffers - low pedal counts and short cable runs don't require them (although I have toyed with the idea of putting a single 12AX7 buffer amp in my latest.)
Here's the first board I ever built:
A slightly later version that saw a lot of use in bars and frat parties:
Later versions used standard 12" x 18" ATA-style flight cases rather than homemade pine-and-plywood boxes.
After 15 years of pedalboard-less child rearing, my newest and hopefully last (
yeah, right) model is on my workbench right now.
Oh, and to answer WhoFan's original question about shielding: If you look closely, you can see two basic types of wiring in that board, single conductor and shielded. Cornish obviously shields his audio right in the cable, which protects the signal path not only from outside interference but also from internal sources like relays coils and the power supply. In my pedalboards, I use single conductor unshielded wire for everything, and shield the overall box. So, mine are wired more like a point-to-point tube guitar amp. My top plate is aluminum, and I line the sides and bottom with light-gauge aluminum flashing. The one time I omitted the shielding, it was noisy.
