In 2019, guitarist Rob Scallon enlisted the Sweetwater music gear company to help him create the official world's largest guitar pedal board…and then play a song on it. This 70-foot-long beast consists of 319 pedals spread across 34 individual pedal boards linked together with 500+ feet of cabling, and required 8 people to handle its 1000+ knobs.
I'm pretty sure I've lived in apartments smaller than this pedalboard.
In addition the 8 minute video above, Scallon has his own larger 30-minute-long behind-the-scenes video, and Sweetwater has some more bonus content about the inspiration behind the project, as well as a list of every pedal involved and the complicated math of figuring out how to power the damn thing, plus a breakdown of how they arranged the pedals so they wouldn't sound like shit. (Or at least, what the limit of muddled noise was.)
This also brings me back to a decade ago, when I went to the first Wilco-curated musical festival/art show at Mass MoCA. Guitarist Nels Cline setup an interactive stompbox exhibit in one section of the museum, where people could go and play around with a long chain of pedals just to see how they might change the white noise at the source. Unlike the video above, however, there was nothing melodic about that. (It was fun to make some noise, though.)
Creating the World's Largest Guitar Effect Pedalboard [Mac McDonough / Sweetwater]
