Marking your signal chain to pedals

Permanently mark the order of each pedal in your signal chain on the pedals themselves according to your preliminary masking tape markings, using Dymo labels.

It’s important to know the order of the pedals should you have to remove a pedal for maintenance, or replace it with a different effect later on. We use a Dymo-printer at Custom Boards, but another brand’s printer will do as well, same as neat handwriting using a permanent felt pen on adhesive tape.

Cabel color-coding

Should you want to stay informed about which cable goes where, you could use coloured electrician’s tape to mark the cables before removing the masking tape pieces. Earlier we’ve used this method ourselves, but the improved quality of patch cables makes this redundant in our view. It’s much more important to indicate the order of all the effect pedals, and which PSU cable is connected to which effect.

SquarePlug has come up with an interesting idea to mark the cables. They offer a selection of anodized screws for their connector plugs in many different colors, witch which you can mark patch cables with ease and style.

Mark your power supply outputs

Additionally, prepare labels with sensible abbreviations for labeling the PSU. You have to know which output feeds which effect pedal, especially if you have to swap one effect for another that has a different plug or differing power requirements.

• Pull off the masking tape with your power output markings from the PSU, and stick it to the side of the pedalboard as a reminder.

• Mark all PSU outputs using the labels printed earlier, after what you can discard the masking tape strip for good.