A little over two years ago, I decided to get my pedals organized on a real, live board. Without the pedalboard, I was always looking for a fresh 9V, fumbling with patch cords, wishing I had brought such-and-such with me.
Here's where that landed, and I have hardly swapped anything on/off it since I built it:
G2 pedal switcher (my board is made with the perfect dimensions to fit the G2 on bottom row)
Cali76 compressor
SickAs clean boost (Klon clone)
Analogman Sun Lion (beano boost + fuzz)
Analogman KOT
TC electronics chorus
MXR phaser
Strymon Mobius
Strymon Timeline
TC electronics reverb
My board leaned more to low-gain pedals and modulation. Only high-gain pedal is the analogman.
What I didn't love about the board: Having a Mobius makes the TC electronics chorus and MXR phaser mostly redundant. And my board also had two delays. I would use that little micro pedal to do the slap-back thing, and use the Timeline for everything else. Also some redundancy there, since I could easily do those short delays with the timeline, and since I'm never using both delays at once.
I wanted to experiment with some new sounds, so I just spent half a day with a soldering iron, zip ties, and all that crap.
Biggest constraint is power distribution. I have Walrus Audio Phoenix, which has plenty of 9V slots, but only four of those can be over 100 mA... which limits number of digital pedals.
Here's where I landed:
Sex Drive made it back on the board. Tough call between that and the SickAs for a clean boost. I'd never sell either one.
On the top right is Walrus Audio Luminary, which is a multi-octave POG thing. Does a great B3, which I can then run through a leslie sound on the Mobius + reverb. I can also use it in front of a fuzz as a low-octave thing whenever I'm feeling anti-social. Very fun pedal. Love it. Does everything a POG does... and more.... for a fraction of the footprint. Also lets you save three presets, which is a nice feature for a pedal that has a shit ton of knobs.
Bottom left is a ThorpyFX fallout cloud, which is Big Muff-inspired. Sounds fantastic. I think I like it more than the Analogman fuzz, though the Thorpy doesn't do the same clean tone when you roll the guitar volume way back.
Also a ThorpyFX Deep Oggin, which is basically a chorus with a few extra controls (blend, vibrato, treble). Still getting my head around what it does.
Empress phaser. Empress makes cool shit. I've got their tape delay, and it's amazing. Anyway, this phaser does so many different modes and sounds. The basic phaser sounds are killer, and you can also use it as a filter that works/sounds like an auto-wah. Like the Luminary, the empress phaser lets you save a few presets.
Really wanted to take the Timeline off the board and use either the Empress tape delay or my old Novadelay, but I couldn't make the power supplies work out (nova delay uses a 12V high-currency input that my power supply won't do).
Hopefully these new sounds will inspire new songs.