If you lost your pedalboard on the day of your gig.......

nocasternoproblem

Pedalboard?  What's that?

JayGee

How about if you turn up at a gig, unload, and find you’ve left both guitars at home? :-)

This actually happened to me, fortunately @MattG was depicted for our other guitarist and had remembered to put two in so I used his SG for the night and he hardly ever laughs at me over it...

Getting back to the original question, yes, I’ve had my pedalboard go dead on me just before I was due to start playing - not a massive problem, yes some songs didn’t quite sound right to me and some where I’d normally be doing kind of ambient picky stuff sounded a bit empty without a delay pedal but I doubt the punters even noticed to be honest...

viz

Straight into the amp and ride the vol knob, probably unnoticeable to the crowd!

Maynehead

I’ve got 3 foot switchable channels on my amp, plus solo boost, so I’m sorted.

Sassafras

How do you think we managed before pedals were even a thing?

Teetonetal

Depends on the gig and ranges from complete und utter buggery to meh no difference. But I'd do the gig regardless.

UnclePsychosis

How many trolling threads would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck threads? 

Grunfeld

siraxeman said:

What I wanna know though...is what would Angus do ?  

The other day I went to make myself a cup of tea (I make lots of cups of tea, but this was a cup of tea I made the other day).
Instead of my favourite radio station I thought I'd put on another one while the water was boiling in the kettle.
A rock station.  So, fair enough, I'm primed to be expecting rock.
click 
One chord --- one solitary chord.  That's all it took and I knew:  AC/DC.
Because the sound is always the same.

If Angus had to play down the Dog and Duck with a singer who handed him a set list which went from The Beatles to Van Morrison to the Black Eyed Peas -- then Angus...
would borrow my pedal board.

Hoof

Well I always keep a headstock tuner on me for emergencies and my amp does high gain and has a boost switch so I'd be fine. Did an outdoor gig this way in the summer because the weather was looking iffy so I wanted to minimise the gear on stage in case we needed to pack up quickly. 

siraxeman

Grunfeld said:

siraxeman said:

What I wanna know though...is what would Angus do ?  

One chord --- one solitary chord.  That's all it took and I knew:  AC/DC.
Because the sound is always the same.

If Angus had to play down the Dog and Duck with a singer who handed him a set list which went from The Beatles to Van Morrison to the Black Eyed Peas -- then Angus...
would borrow my pedal board.

Methinks he'd not at all wanna borrow your board...he'd either ride the guitar volume for all his sounds - clean to dirty and all inbetween sounds, or he'd refuse to play "all that cheese" and leave. All Angus would need for the Dog n Duck would be an attenuator. Sure the Edge would be stuffed if he was missing his delays though.

TTBZ

I'd go straight into my amp, I get most of my sound from the amp anyway so I'd be fine, just wouldn't have a lead boost.

mudslide73

I reckon I'd get away with it. I only use an EP type boost really anyway so I could fiddle with the amp a bit. A bit of Phase 90 on a couple of songs but I could do without that. 

Roland

siraxeman said:

AlexC said:

Obviously, this is another way for the OP to see how reliant people are on pedals - ha!

Yes obvs! Now then you lot that aren't playing ball - for you its a differenter situation. You have turned up to a gig miles and miles away from home, open the car/van boot to unload your guitar and all you've packed is your amp and a guitar...you forgot the rest. So the bass player has a spare cable for you to connect guitar to amp but that's all ya got. And now, for not playing nice you can't even cancel the gig cos you're at the venue and going on in 30mins and the band won't let you bail. That'll teach ya!

Not a problem. Each guitar case has a spare jack-to-jack cable, and one has a headstock tuner. My toolbox has an emergency tube screamer.

MrMusic

siraxeman said:

AlexC said:

Obviously, this is another way for the OP to see how reliant people are on pedals - ha!

Yes obvs! Now then you lot that aren't playing ball - for you its a differenter situation. You have turned up to a gig miles and miles away from home, open the car/van boot to unload your guitar and all you've packed is your amp and a guitar...you forgot the rest. So the bass player has a spare cable for you to connect guitar to amp but that's all ya got. And now, for not playing nice you can't even cancel the gig cos you're at the venue and going on in 30mins and the band won't let you bail. That'll teach ya!

Then the power go's down in the venue, so no amp, no PA and all you have are a few candles and your acoustic guitar that you luckily keep in the boot of the car for those special campfire sing songs and any potential Zombie apocalypse end of the world no power situations like this......

What would Django Reinhardt do?

Fez

As long as I have the footswitch for changing channels on my amp I could manage. If we play a short set on a multi band gig where we have to get on and off quickly I sometimes don't take my pedalboard.

Cabicular

I don’t take an amp so I would struggle
i do keep a digitech RP360 in the boot in case of emergencies

shaunm

I would struggle however my amp has two channels. So I would set the drive channel so that my drive tones are all there on the volume control. 

I had this at a gig earlier in the year when my board failed mid set. I was using a JCM800 and I did the same. Set the amp so that I had my full drive tone and used my guitar volume to clean up. 

It wasnt my favourite sound but im positive nobody else in the room gave a toss. 

My delay sounds are minimal, my Wah use is sparing, reverb on the amp. I’d miss my fuzzface though.

Sporky

It'd be fine - I'd just wake myself up.

hywelg

I'd grab a spare overdrive from the store and off we.go.....