In my ongoing (and slightly obsessive) quest for efficiency, I’ve ended up with a pedalboard that’s incredibly minimal—no extra pedals I don’t use—but also kind of a cable nightmare.

I’m using the 4-cable method, plus I’ve got the switcher controlling amp channel changes, so that’s actually 5 cables running in and out of the board. Not exactly tidy, but it works.

The DIY pedal is a Rams Head Muff clone I built—mainly for solos. Otherwise, I rely on the amp's gain (Marshall DSL20CR).

The real magic is the switcher: I can reorder pedals on the fly, and drop things in or out of the effects loop making it super flexible.  For example, my EQ pedal can either sit in the loop to cut some bass, boost mids, and add volume—or go in front of the amp or Muff to act more like a Tube Screamer-style boost. Same with the BP booster—it behaves totally differently depending on where it’s placed, and I can swap it around depending on the context.

It's simple. It's complicated. But it does everything I need, and best of all minimises tap-dancing. I’d like to maybe add a Rat or similar, but that would really just be for times when I need to use someone else’s clean or single channel amp.

Somehow made a board that's both super streamlined and unnecessarily complex