I've been working for quite some time on building my own pedal board for my guitar effect pedals. Because my effects chain is constantly changing (usually from gig to gig and sometimes song to song) I decided to route all the effects to a patch bay so I could reorder all of the effects quickly.
20 gauge instrument cable and L plugs are connected to the input/output of each of the pedals, and routed to a plastic project casing at the head of the board where they are each soldered to 1/4" jacks. This way, all of the actual pedals can remain stationary, yet I can reorder the placement in the chain just by moving a patch cable over one spot, or bypass an effect completely if it's not needed for a gig.
I've noticed a significant drop in tone quality, however, when using this setup. I've cut all the cables so that they're as short as possible, but the difference between playing my guitar directly through my amp as opposed to this new pedal board is too noticeable to be able to gig with. I've tried bypassing all the effects, and just routed my guitar through the tuner pedal (which has the shortest cable since it's closest to the patch bay) yet the tone still suffers the same loss. I've determined it's not a problem with cable length since this the use of this one pedal would have added less than a foot of extra length.
Two things that I've considered as possible suspects are either 1) shoddy soldering job. My soldering skills are decent enough to make a strong joint, however, they could always be better. Could this be robbing me of my guitar tone?
2) shielding at the actual patch bay? the cable itself is fairly standard shielded instrument cable, but I basically soldered one of the ends of each of the cables to a 1/4" jack and mounted it in a plastic case. Could the close proximity of each of the jacks be somehow causing interference?
Any and all suggestions would be welcome. This is my first significant diy audio project, so I'm learning as I'm going.
20 gauge instrument cable and L plugs are connected to the input/output of each of the pedals, and routed to a plastic project casing at the head of the board where they are each soldered to 1/4" jacks. This way, all of the actual pedals can remain stationary, yet I can reorder the placement in the chain just by moving a patch cable over one spot, or bypass an effect completely if it's not needed for a gig.
I've noticed a significant drop in tone quality, however, when using this setup. I've cut all the cables so that they're as short as possible, but the difference between playing my guitar directly through my amp as opposed to this new pedal board is too noticeable to be able to gig with. I've tried bypassing all the effects, and just routed my guitar through the tuner pedal (which has the shortest cable since it's closest to the patch bay) yet the tone still suffers the same loss. I've determined it's not a problem with cable length since this the use of this one pedal would have added less than a foot of extra length.
Two things that I've considered as possible suspects are either 1) shoddy soldering job. My soldering skills are decent enough to make a strong joint, however, they could always be better. Could this be robbing me of my guitar tone?
2) shielding at the actual patch bay? the cable itself is fairly standard shielded instrument cable, but I basically soldered one of the ends of each of the cables to a 1/4" jack and mounted it in a plastic case. Could the close proximity of each of the jacks be somehow causing interference?
Any and all suggestions would be welcome. This is my first significant diy audio project, so I'm learning as I'm going.