In July 2019, Sweetwater employees spearheaded the construction of the officially certified GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ World’s Largest Guitar Effect Pedalboard — 319 effects pedals on 34 Temple Audio DUO 24 pedalboards connected together with roughly 500 feet of patch cables. This gargantuan string of pedals was then routed into seven Marshall DSL100HR 100-watt tube amp heads pushing 14 Marshall MX412BR 240-watt 4 x 12″ straight extension cabinets.
Whoa! 319 effects pedals, 34 pedalboards, seven Marshall heads, 14 Marshall cabinets, one guitar, and one super-eager guitar player who’s about to realize a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS achievement.
This rig was massive — all 34 pedalboards end to end wouldn’t even fit across The Clyde Theatre’s 70′-wide stage. And when it came time to move it? It sounds like a joke, but it wasn’t. “How many designers and engineers does it take to move the World’s Largest Pedalboard?” Lots.
Click here to see the exhaustive list of all 319 pedals.
It took an army of talented professionals not only to assemble but also to move and position this enormous pedalboard (all four rows of it) — the largest ever assembled in the history of the world.
The Personnel
Sweetwater enlisted the most qualified professionals in the industry, along with some incredibly talented Sales Engineers from within our ranks, to assemble this monstrosity. The designers, all of which were delighted to participate in this overwhelming task, included Robert Keeley of Keeley Electronics, Josh Scott of JHS Pedals, Ryan Dyck of Temple Audio, and Brian Wampler of Wampler Pedals. The Sales Engineers and Sweetwater employees who joined us to help wire up this magnificent monster were Andrew Plassman, Shawn Dealey, Ben Porter, Charlie Davis, David Hess, Robert Williams, Geoff Allen, Philip Courtney, and Dave Dunsire. Rob Scallon and his team stepped up to help with the giant assembly project too.
Pedal designers (left to right) Robert Keeley, Josh Scott, Ryan Dyck, and Brian Wampler standing beside the baby they helped build.
From Guitar to Pedalboard
The guitar’s signal was connected to the rig via a Shure AD4DUS wireless system, which plugged into an EarthQuaker Devices Swiss Things. The Swiss Things was used as a master bypass — a dead man’s switch, if you will — in case things got out of hand. When you’re dealing with 300-plus effects pedals — 133 of which are dirt boxes — connected to 700 watts of British tube-fueled muscle, you don’t take chances!
Designers Brian Wampler and Robert Keeley (background) and Sales Engineer Andrew Plassman work on building the individual pedalboards, just three of the 34 total boards!
From Pedal to Pedal
Our pedalboard contained three tuners, 11 wahs, 19 compressors, 15 boosts/preamps, six EQs, 20 harmonizing pedals, 89 overdrives/distortions, 30 fuzzes, four gates/noise suppressors, 43 modulation/effect boxes, 50 delays/reverbs, seven loopers, seven bass effects, 10 synth/keyboard emulators, and five utility boxes — 319 pedals in all. In an effort to create a cohesive guitar tone, we arranged the pedals in a common-sense order, with gain pedals placed near the beginning of the chain, noise gates in the middle, and ambient effects last.
To see the pedal signal flow diagram and routing, download the pdf here.
Once we finished hooking up all the pedals with 500 feet of cable, it was hard to get them all in one shot. They stretched over 70 feet in length — wider than the stage. “We’re gonna need a bigger truck…to haul your pedalboard.”
The pedals were daisy-chained together in a single circuit — no external loops or switches were used, with the exception of the aforementioned Swiss Things. This, of course, meant that each pedal had to be switched on and off with its own respective built-in footswitch. And with four rows with almost 80 pedals in each row — it was quite a workout!
We used EBS PCF series patch cables — 400 x PCF-DL10, 50 x PCF-DL18, and 50 x PCF-DL28. We also had Shawn Dealey build custom-length cables that ran from row to row — 3 x 30 feet and 3 x 50 feet. When you add it all together, that’s about 500 feet of cable, a distance greater than one-and-a-half football fields! Each individual DUO 24 employed Temple Audio 4-way Jack Patch Modules for easy connectivity between boards.
From Pedalboard to Amps
The output of the pedalboard went to a Radial Shotgun, which split the signal into four outputs. Three of those outputs were routed to three of the effect loop returns on the DSL100HR heads, bypassing the DSL100HR preamp sections entirely. After all, when you have almost 90 distortion pedals, you don’t need to add any more gain stages to your rig! The Radial Shotgun’s fourth output fed into a second Radial Shotgun, which then split out to the remaining four Marshall head effect loop returns. The DSL100HR heads were then connected to the speaker cabinets beneath them in typical fashion, running at an 8-ohm load.
Designers and Rob Scallon standing around admiring their handiwork. “Do you think it’s gonna work? I guess we’ll see.” Sure enough, it did.
Powering the Pedals
Each of the 34 pedalboards was powered by a single Temple Audio Hi5 MOD power supply module — one of the cleanest power supplies we’ve ever heard. Each of these modules boasts five isolated outlets. Pedals that needed 12-, 15-, or 18-volt power were given their own outlet to conform with their individual requirements.
Brian Wampler, Alex Fernandez, and Rob Ruccia work on getting the pedals all mounted to the pedalboards.
So how much power did this gargantuan rig use? According to Ohm’s Law, power (P) in watts (W) is equal to the voltage V (V) in volts times the current (I) in amps (A), which can be written as:
P(W) = V(V) × I(A)
Each of the Hi5 MOD’s outlets yields 9 volts at 660mA. If we apply the aforementioned formula (V x A), we learn that each outlet delivers 5.94 watts.
5.94(W) = 9(V) x 0.66(A)
Multiply that by 5, and we see that each individual power supply provides 29.7 watts. Multiply that by the 34 units that we used, and we see that our pedalboard was supplied with 1,000-plus watts of power.
5.94W x 5 outlets = 29.7W per power supply
29.7W x 34 pedalboards = 1009.8W
Conquering Impedance
Andrew Plassman, Rob Scallon, and Rob Ruccia work on prepping the pedals to be mounted on the pedalboards.
Sonic integrity was always on our mind while we were assembling and testing our pedalboard. And impedance can be an unforgiving thing. Even with all the pedals in bypass, 500 feet of cable is guaranteed to cause significant signal degradation, which leads to undesirable tone suckage. And we wanted the sound that came out of the end of the pedal chain to sound as true to the guitar’s original signal as possible.
It took over a dozen designers, engineers, and Sales Engineers to assemble and test the fully assembled pedalboard.
The pedals on our board were in two camps, at roughly a 2-to-1 ratio of true bypass to buffered, which was not quite enough to push a high-impedance audio signal through an absurdly lengthy signal chain. Not to mention that the buffered pedals weren’t distributed evenly throughout the rig. To solve this conundrum, we installed a Temple Audio Dual Buffer Module on each of the individual pedalboards to further bolster the guitar’s signal. That said, the Dual Buffer Module on some of the boards was disabled to accommodate the pedals (most notably fuzzes and other vintage-style units) that don’t play nice with buffers.
In Conclusion
319 pedals. 34 individual pedalboards. 500 feet of cable. 1000+ watts of power. 700 watts of amplification. And it worked! And sounded good (we knew you were wondering). This is the biggest, baddest guitar rig the world has ever seen — and it could only happen at Sweetwater!
Pedals for days. With all the pedals we collected, you could play one pedal a day for over 10 months and still not try them all.
Bonus Round – Rush’s Alex Lifeson Stopped by to Play!
So what was it like to play guitar through the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS World’s Largest Guitar Effect Pedalboard? Why not ask world-renowned guitarist Alex Lifeson from Rush. He was at Sweetwater that day and decided to drop by and try it out for himself. He couldn’t believe it. The verdict? He was all smiles.
Rob Scallon and Rush’s Alex Lifeson — like two guitar-slinging kids playing in the world’s largest candy store.
World’s Largest Pedalboard
The Complete List of 319 Pedals
