Last night we celebrated the 10th anniversary of my "other" band, The Timber Merchants. We went back and played the very first venue we ever performed in, at Newnham College in Cambridge. We're a 6-piece band, so our stage setup is pretty involved:



I took my usual rig of Egnater Tweakers, 4U rack with RJM Mini Effect Gizmo, Y-Not and Mini Line Mixer, pedal shelf with Keeley DS1, Sweet Sound Mo'Faux, EVH Phase 90, CAE 401 Boost and Fulltone OCD v4, and TC G Major II, plus of course my Ibanez JS guitars:



And of course controlling it was my RJM MasterMind, along with my Morley wah and volume, and my custom interface box with tap tempo footswitch connected up to the MasterMind as per the instructions on this very forum:



We had an awesome night, with loads of old friends coming down to see us play (many of whom were at the first gig, and including one of our friends who flew all the way from San Francisco to surprise us!), and I can honestly say my guitar has never sounded better in a live setting.

You definitely have thought out that rig well - I think you've pretty well maximized the amount features you can get in that amount of space!

Yeah, it's pretty compact! We managed to fit the guitar rig (with two guitars), the entire drum kit (with cases) and the 5 monitors in the back of my mini-MPV. Not a lot of room to spare, mind!

I'm considering building a separate 4U sub rack with a couple of Mini Effect Gizmos and 10 or so pedals for when I want to get creative / for recording etc though. The plan being that I can use 1 rack or both, depending on the requirements - there will just be 5 cables (4 XLRs and a power cable) linking the two together. Just need to save up some cash first, so it could take a while...

Hi Martin. what is the interface box you have on your board? How is everything hooked up to it? Did you build or have it built? Thanks

I built it (although I had a friend who's a technology teacher at a local high school drill the five 15/16" holes for the XLRs in the box for me). I use a modified Pedalsnake to connect to my rig, with 3 3-pin (MIDI, and two send-and-return audio channels) and one 5-pin (for power - one pair carries 9VAC to the Mastermind, the other pair 9VDC for the wah and volume) male XLRs on each end. So the external-facing side of the interface box has the 4 XLR connectors.

I used TRS mini jack connectors for the audio (and tap-tempo) connections on the pedalboard side, as much for space saving as anything else, and I'm using colour coded phono jacks for the three power outputs. There's a side-mounted XLR to carry the MIDI from the MasterMind, too. The tap tempo switch is a basic DPDT latching footswitch, connected to the MasterMind's expression input using a special cable with a resistor inside the jack plug, as documented on the forum here.

Because the box is made of ABS, not aluminium or steel, I didn't have to worry about any grounding issues with it, which made the wiring a lot simpler. The internal wiring was done using off-cuts of quality shielded cable (mostly Van Damme, but there might be a little bit of Mogami or Sommer in there), with length kept to a minimum to reduce loss.

The whole thing probably took me a few hours to do (I wasn't counting) but it's meant I was able to keep everything very neat on the board, and when I gig, I connect the four XLRs to the pedalboard and to the interface on the back of my rack, connect the amps up to the rack via a custom 6-cable snake I built, connect power and speaker cables and I'm ready to rock. There's also no mains power at my feet so I don't need to run the risk of things coming unplugged or people spilling beer into electrical sockets.

Very cool. I need to figure out how to do something like that on my board, I really like the clean look.

Hey Martin, I just ordered a G-Major II for my rig. I've been simply running a bunch of stomp boxes through my RG-16 which was a piece of cake to program. I'm new at midi programming and have never used an effects processor. I don't want to be a bother, but could I hit you up for help and questions? You seem to know your stuff. If so, can I get your email address? If not, no worries!

Hey JB,

I can't remember - are you using a Mastermind or another controller?

Ron, I'm using a Mastermind. There's a short list of things that I'd like to get setup with the G Major II that are hopefully very simple.

-Have my effects running through the fx loop (obviously). Do I need to use the 4-cable method for this? I don't know anything about that other than the term.

-Have my delay trails fade out naturally and not be cut off when I switch presets on my Mastermind.

-Be able to use an external tap pedal for tapping tempo of delays. I don't want to use the function button on the Mastermind for this.

I also intend on using a couple pedals with the RG 16. (TS9, Noise Gate, and possibly a compressor)

You don't need the 4-cable method to run in an effects loop (and actually can't use 4 cable method with the G-Major). The 4-cable method puts your effects processor in the effects loop AND in front of the amp, and can only be done on a processor that has its own effects loop built-in.

To retain delay trails, the simplest thing to do is leave the G-Major on all of the time. Don't switch it out with your RG-16 , and don't switch off your amps' effects loop. Only switch presets on the G-Major, and make a preset that has no effects for when you need to run dry. You can also add a line mixer to improve your dry tone, but it's probably best to set it up without the mixer first for simplicity's sake.

If you look in the Mastermind section of the forum, there's a post showing how to wire an external pedal switch to work with the Mastermind's expression pedal jack. Martin (who started this thread) is using an external tap tempo switch in his rig.