It has been a week-ish since the EP was released and I have a few notes to post in here about the process around that too, as well as finishing the art, but I am half cut so I will attempt to cover something I can talk about without thinking instead: A PEDALBOARD.
I have been using the same general board for some time. I have went through several iterations of this in Third Island, generally using the same pedals and approach outside of the distortions. Always have a reverb, delay, low octave, and tuner. To be fair, in most setups you should be able to get away with this for a minimum if you've access to a good amp at a gig, and could lose either the delay or reverb (to taste) but given the style of music and approach for myself it was always going to be expanded on.
I love Moose Electronics' Battlehammer and Sundrive, and for years I used these in parallel, using a Boss LS2 as a mixer, for my guitar tone. I would run the BH dark and the SD bright, tweaked to taste, and found I could get a good heavy crush out of my low end but retain some clarity in the highs without the sound actually appearing separate at the output. I would always recommend experimenting with parallel blending if you are struggling with your tone, at the very least it will help you understand what you are looking for in a distortion.
On and off I would use other fuzzes and dirts, as replacements and accents, but I eventually replaced the whole dirt setup with two of my own builds, the Sardonic Perpetrator and the Organics. The SP is a Harmonic Percolator clone with clipping and high pass options, that I use as an always-on early dirty boost on my rig. The Organics is a parallel Low & High passed overdrive that lets you control & colour each band to taste. The shift worked well with moving to the Tides aluminium baritone as my main guitar, and proved even better when I realised how good the P90 in it was. Clarity, Violence, and Heft - what I always wanted!
Mentioned below, For Nílim I rethought the parallel approach to allow another line for bass. Once this was settled on, I had to make room on my board to make it gig-friendly and simplify things a bit. Approach it functionally - you only want what you use at your feet, and always-on or routed gear goes to the back of the board. No "just in case" gear, you use it or you don't. Be strict to purpose and in line with function. Boards are malleable when you are writing, jamming, but make it purposeful for gigging.
A brief aside on the actual board here. In a previous job I salvaged some mixed material crates, and built it from those. It is aluminium rungs with wooden supports. Some rubber chair risers are on the front with wooden off-cuts to give decent height. The entire thing was assembled to fit a shoulder carry soft case I already had. I recommend you do something similar. Pedalboards are made from anything at all, but make sure you can carry it comfortably and you have a means to do so. You can absoluteley cobble the board together from anything.
I won't reiterate on the signal chain itself (see post on 2025.10.13). The new layout put everything that didn't need switching to the back of the board - including the full "bass" line chain - and I tidied up the cabling. I ran my Organics at 12V for a little more headroom, which works nicely with my current tube amp. Without going too technical, I've no clipping options on and the Op Amps in the pedal work up to/over +-18V so you won't get rail breakup at higher gain values, allowing you to cleanly push an amp harder with the output. This is a per-rig setup and may not work depending on your own amp or preferred type of pedal/amp distortion but it works here, pushing the clean channel of a 5150 basically.
Obviously building and maintaining your own patch cables is ideal but even as someone who can do that, let's be realistic here - use some that suffer decent online reviews and have a relatively low profile. Thomann's half-profile jacks are decent to dig you out of an awkardly tight layout. Most importantly pay attention to foot spacing on the front row and don't needlessly optimise. If you plan on changes, plan it again when you change it again. I used whatever I had, some bought and some pre-made from older builds. I stripped all the old cable anchors off to redo my underside runs.
Nobody wil see underneath but it will help you troubleshoot to tidy it right. Use cable anchors, ties, velcro, whatever you have. If you want easy access, use velcro loops. Cable anchors are absolutely the best but make sure you have a means of ripping them apart short notice if anything fails. Your housekey is sharp enough to pop a cable tie if you hook it angled against the base/tooth and use it's own pressure against itself.
I am running a 4-cable method as well as a separate bass line so I needed a patch bay to at least simplify the outputs and returns on the board. I had plenty of jacks here and a 125B enclosure, so I could drilled out four on each side and made up my wiring internally as needed. I made a send/return loop using switched jacks so if nothing is plugged into them, it defaults to pass through. A useful exlusion to allow you to adapt to other people's gear. I also wired up the main guitar line on both audio and power (using two separate supplies) so you can plug directly into the guitar line only via the first tuner if needed. I even left some slack on the anchored cables to let this swap work without issue or removing pedals.
