My name is Bob Bradshaw. My company’s called Custom Audio Electronics.
And I’ve been doing this audio interfacing; primarily for guitar players starting back in 1981, because we’ve been early on introduced me to Michael Landau who is well one of my dearest friends. He used to be a childhood friends with Steve Lukather. Steve Lukather begot Van Halen. Steve Lukather brought me David Gilmour with Pink Floyd, Andy Summers came to me after seeing this stuff thru Peter Frampton who I met thru Steve Lukather. With Eric Clapton, I work with the Steve Lukather. The first one I got was for the Zoo TV Tour back in 1992 and so we’ve built pretty elaborated systems right then.
This is very typical of an old pedal board from the 1970’s even though these are brand new and we just built them. Some people like it this way. Now what that gives is everything at your feet, you can look down, you can see where the knobs are set, that’s all fine and dandy. But as you can see here, if you were to stand here and to start using this thing on the stage, you’re playing, possibly singing and you’re stepping on all kinds of funny little buttons here. Maybe a lever switch like a bass pedal or a little hard switch here like these little effects boxes here, different style of pedals, different styles of switches, overshoot or break a knob off with your foot, you know, everything can get beat up because you’re stepping all over. There’s numerous possibilities here for things to go wrong in a traditional pedal board like this.
What this is, is a switching network, an audio routing patch bass so as to speak. All of the effects plug into a rack mounted audio router controlled by this RS-10 foot controller. Each switch on the board here is a particular pedal or function in your system. So it acts just like a traditional pedal board in a sense and that you’ve got access to every single thing, now you have the ability to pre-set combinations of these things on and off. I can have one button can have multiple things come on and off now, now that you have pre-sets.
All of the sounds you make on a record, you can recreate a lot, just by this, you know, the drop of the switch right here. Now, I mean you can go from absolutely dry and nothing and [Demonstration] that’s it [Demonstration] that was just like plugging it in. And it bypassed all the other stuff. Now if you’re going to step on this a little bit, you know [Demonstration] It just add a little delay, so you see [Demonstration] it carries off like that [Demonstration].
Another great benefit to this approach over this is the fact that here you’re running thru every single cable, every single effect—everything, all the time. That’s why people will go, “Men, I’m running thru all of these pedals and everything, what’s happening to my guitar tone? When I plug my guitar straight into my amp, it sounds great, when I plug thru this pedal board, sound like this?”
Having a looping system is the cleanest, clearest, most pure signal path you can possibly have if you’re going to use multiple effects in a system and here’s why.
What happens is we go thru a series of loops but we truly bypass the effect and the cables connecting the effect. So the signal path is much pure in this case, even though you have all these things bypassed, they’re still active circuitry that can color the tone in the signal path. It’s a capacitive build up that ends up sounding like your tone control is on half way on the guitar a lot of times.
In my switching systems, you’re not relying on patch chords to make the connections and stuff and that keeps the signal path pure and cleaner. That’s the goal here primarily. It’s to be able to utilize all of these stuff but to not wreck the fundamental tone that you have in the first place, that’s the key thing here. You want to sound like you’re plug and straight into your amp.
After about 10 years of this, they got to where things finally started being predictable. It took a long, long time because I’m taking gear from multiple manufactures here and trying to build them into a system that’s going to work together and I’m dealing with different impedances from one guy who has a hot soldering iron in his garage and makes a fuzz tone and you know, it’s supposed to be the greatest thing to, you know, Eventide and Lexicon, you know and I’m trying to meld all these stuff together and make it work right.
I realize that I had some building blocks that were the same and so we came up with switchers like the 4x4 audio controller. It came out with an RS-10. Then there’s the universal box, you can take this thing and use it in another application, you know, it sends program changes in the sense controller numbers. We’ll build all kinds and little things like that, little foot twitches, little boxes where you’ll rack mount power supplies such as this here, to eliminate all the “wall warts” to customized my electronics.
I like to think that my systems don’t have a sound. They don’t, really. You could take this rig and have five different guys plug into it, and then there’s going to be five different waves of sound. I tend to like to work with the end user but I do work with a lot of the guitar tech guys, so that’s the other thing. When we talk, I try to get people speak in my language in terms of the building blocks and pedal works which is why there’s information like that on the website because you know, questions—“How do I determine what need?”
And the most fun part is conceptualizing the thing in the first place, deciding what they want to do and have them come in and plug in.
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