Pedal Saga Part 1: Oh George, you had me at "brass plugs"

Sorry it's been so long. I never meant to piss off all two of my readers.

I'm probably gonna have to divide this up into several posts. Sometimes a story is better after it's complete. Sometimes it's better as it's occuring. Sometimes is fun sometimes.

Here's the gear rundown: Lots of pedals. Some are DIY. Some are stock. Most are modified, at a minimum. PedalTrain PT-Pro board. Mostly George L's cabling. BBE Supa Charger for all the power needs.

So my story starts here: Band practice a few weeks back. I was having a weird intermittent problem where my tuner (Planet Waves Pedal Tuner PT01) would fritz out and suddenly start rebooting. (Yes, I said reboot. Deal with it.) Okay, that sucked. Bad tuner right? Yanked it out of the chain, all was well for a while.

Every so often, my signal starts to come and go all throughout my pedalboard. I never could isolate it. Great. Is it one of the looper pedals I built? A bad/loose jack on a pedal? Cabling? My power supply?

Of course the first thing I do is doubt myself and my pedal making abilities, for some stupid reason. After thinking about it for awhile, I realize there's probably more than one thing going on.

First thing I need to do is see if my tuner really is bad. Nope. It's fine. Plugged it in by itself, no problems. Works like the first day I bought it. Hmm... I've got a feeling I've not powered this guy correctly. More on that in another post.

Second thing I need to do is check my cabling. Now, lot's of guys are 100% anti-George L's. I get that. They're solderless which can mean failure for some. I tend to think it has much more to do with proper (read: improper) termination. (I'll probably do a post about that, too, down the road.) So while I don't think they're the end-all cable, they're still great and in the top 3% or so of custom cable solutions out there.

Third thing, my pouch on my PedalTrain bag just fell off, "RRRRRrrrrip," that same night on the way to practice, and I was really starting to get frustrated at my whole pedalboard setup. I was starting to feel like the sucker was becoming sentient and was about to sprout legs and run away from me. More on that in yet another post.

So let's go back to the cables. Long story short here: Many of the George L's connector were brass. I'd noticed a) they'd seemed less tight in the jacks lately and b) some of the brass was corroding green on me. Not alarming, but not really the greatest thing either. Perhaps it was the jacks, but I rebent some of them and that didn't seem to help.

So I emailed George L's and asked if they'd seen this before. They were extremely quick to reply with a nice solution: "Ahh the brass plugs. We'll trade them out for you with nickel or gold plugs. Oh and send us your t-shirt size."

WOOT! I already had a nickel kit, and they were great. Nickel it was! I mailed my brassies (25 of them!) and got nickel right angle replacements back about 4 days later. PLUS the t-shirt, a nice big sticker, and 10' of extra .155" cable. WOW, I was impressed. (I'm not saying you will get the same freebies if you have a problem with your connectors, but they were eager to please me.)

Are the brass plugs no good in general? Honestly I have no idea. And maybe the softer brass was starting to conform to the jacks and thereby becoming problematic? I don't know, and don't care to go there. I was happy with the solution.

It was time to start making my cables for my board again! I'll talk about the proper way to terminate George L's in another post.