boss walwart

Hi ! I've got extensive experience with DC power. That boss is relatively underpowered for your application. And you'd need an extension power string to hook up all three if they all have the same size input.

An internet search for each device should reveal their power draw. I find this info is best found in the operating manual specs section.

The key number is the 200ma of power.

Add up the power draw of all 3 pedals and I bet you'll exceed 200ma if they are all on at the same time.

But on the other hand, I'm not familiar with the Vox or Korg.

The old Boss adapters in common use are 500ma. You might track one down to make sure you don't underpower anything.

And if you really want to make sure, and have the option to add more pedals, try a 1000ma or 2000ma adapter for sale in the usual places.

Trust me, you'll eventually want to add pedals soon enough.

The Vox isn't going to have an AC input, you'll need a battery clip.

Ha. I've got so many pedalboards and floorboards and wires running everywhere I couldn't conceive of such simplicity !

Ok then. The issue is the cable you have to attach to the Boss output plug plus the possibility of two more adaptor cables.

I will assume the korg and boss are the same negative polarity, and the same type plug. If your Boss powers the Screamer and the Korg...good.

If not, a reverse wire is needed. But I'll assume the Boss powers the Screamer and the Korg individually.

The old WHA is a question mark but a comment was made that it's probably powered via 9v battery, so I'll assume that because it would be nice to run it via
the Boss instead of battery power.

What I'd do is go to ebay and check to see what I find for the 9v battery issue. I used to find a 9v to male conversion wire pretty easily. So I used that and a female to female polarity switcher. When you attach the 9v clip in the Wha to the 9v in the wire, the polarity should be reversed, hence the polarity switcher.

Next I'd find a power extension string on ebay with 3(or 4) male plugs and one female plug that matches the Boss plug. Often, these reverse the polarity, and they don't bother to mention this. If it keeps the same negative polarity of the Boss, then your main cord looks like :

Boss negative ground male > Boss female cord with 4 negative polarity male plugs.

Then male1 plugs directly into the Screamer, and male3 plugs into the Korg.

Male2 plugs into a female to female polarity switcher plug and then into the polarity switched male to 9v in the Wha.

So you need to buy

1)one Boss sized FEMALE cord with 4 negative polarity male plugs(used to be common on ebay).
2)one female to female polarity switching plug(common with older alarm systems?)
3)one Boss sized MALE to 9v adaptor wire(this is designed to power pedals with a 9v battery on the outside I believe)

In theory you will end up with a Boss 9v AC adaptor that powers all 3 pedals.

Another more expensive option is to buy a 9v power block that is specifically designed to power many pedals at once. It usually includes most needed cords.
It's a little neater but not much. Most likely you'd still have to buy #2 and #3 with the included cords.

Hope this helps !

Hmm. Once again I don't have all the facts and have to make assumptions. And you know what often happens then...!

In my experience, Boss wallwarts are "conditioned" power so they don't make noise. This is one reason why they are expensive. Also, they are rated 9.6volts and are designed specifically for Boss pedals. Yours is rated less but is also likely conditioned.

In my experience there are early versions of One Spots that might have been upgraded, with one version producing 1000ma and the other 2000ma of 9 volt power. I have both.

No matter what size you have, know that a ONE SPOT is packing way more power than you need and I too have noticed when I use it on some low draw pedal, the extra power is too much and it adds noise. I haven't checked the ONE SPOT to see how much voltage is really puts out, but if you measure most wallwarts you will find it's putting out way more voltage than it's rated for. There seems to be some interrelationship of Voltage and Power to arrive at a particular power rating, so real voltage might be higher. This could be the cause. Your single pedal is getting slammed with Voltage in excess of 9 volts or a bigger blast of brute power than it expected and doesn't like it. 

Ah yes...most delays seem to suck up a LOT of power. Maybe 200ma to 300ma in my experience. I have to dedicate an entire battery pack just to a delay. Mine don't have volume drops because I set my volume knob to whatever setting I need to get back to the same volume I had before I turned the thing on. I suspect that's why they put a volume knob on it This remains true no matter what the power input is. Delays suck power so much I doubt they'll work very good with your mini-sized Boss wallwart. But if it's a simple delay...maybe. I'd use the ONE SPOT for any rig using a delay.

But maybe you've got your volume maxxed and you still have a volume drop when you turn it on ? I don't know what to do about that but get a delay that works right. The volume knob should be adjustable to parity. I've heard more issues with volume drop using Whas than I have with delays. I've also heard that some old analog pedals do not work well with modern digital pedals sometimes. And I have a few devices myself that don't work well with each other. And I'm not sure I've got the whole story here(Pro reverb, echoplex, marshall, One SPOT, where did all those come from ? Ha). Sometimes when things are all connected up together, one gets a bad surprise ! :

Anyway, there's a couple shots in the dark for ya

Wow...500ma on the ES-8 ! I thought this was just a giant switch and wouldn't draw much more than for lights. I wonder what's it's really doing ? That's as much or more power as a large LOOPER and it's doing a LOT.

I tried to check the TS but only found only the TSmini, Blues Driver and DS-1.

They are supposedly, in order...18ma, 9ma, and 4ma...and that's amazing if true. But at full volume or an average ? I should have figured that out since they are powered by a 200ma 9v battery internally. They won't get the entire 200ma because the voltage will drop too far to operate, maybe down to 7 volts or so, but still, if one has a battery, it might last for longer than I expected. I'll have to try my 600ma rechargeable 9v and see how long it lasts. The voltage will probably drop too fast to give me any running advantage. Even so, they are so cheap in power cost I'm going to use them more in the future, at least for a boost.

And if his old wha and the tuner and the screamer add up to less than 100ma, forget the Boss and use a rechargeable battery pack !

That draw is so low an X000ma rechargeable cellphone power pack with a 5v to 9v adaptor might do fine.

1K sq ft ? I can only dream on the West Coast. Criminally loud ?

Check out the hearing aid discussion...

The ES-8 is effectively a matrix router, not on-off - you can move the loops around internally on a per-patch basis, serial/parallel pathing, MIDI control of tons of things, LFO expression out (including an internal generator for same), etc.   

The outbuilding with the studio room has a full kitchen/bath as well; I've lived in less1

My neighbors are trees.

I also am a proponent of the "turn it to ungodly with the room mic'd, play from another room altogether" to avoid the blast, and run a small practice amp in the second room to induce feedback on demand.

My rig is immensely complicated these days to put it mildly!

But I'm not doing SRV imitations.

cedar....check out Amazon rechargeable batteries...brand name Talent. The $50 and $70 version(last I checked) aren't worth much for the 12v they advertise(only over 12v for about 15% of the time), however the 9v out is REGULATED power up to 4 or 5 AMPS at a solid 9.15v or so. This is ideal for most 9v pedals and they come with some limited but useful cables. I have 4 I think, and no, you can't have mine ! The only catch is the indicator lights don't monitor when the battery hits 8v or so and cuts itself off. But the battery starts off at 13v and takes a long, long time before cutting itself off. There might be new offerings too...but the output must be 9v regulated to keep your pedals all juiced up ! I ordered a Tomsline battery once that was supposed to be regulated and it might be, but it regulated it at 8.9v. It also had a bad charging cable. Maybe they updated it or there's a new competitor. I use the old Boxking boxes mostly, but they are expensive and their new offerings are NOT regulated, and they are too heavy for my purposes ! Or at least, they were when I tried them. I was helping them with potential future designs in Dec 2019 when I first heard about "pre-Alpha" C. As my hobby is emerging diseases I was one of the first USA peeps to realized it had escaped from China and was heading everywhere. But I don't recommend the current offerings that actually waste battery power lighting up their brand name. Thats silly and the new designs are just too heavy. I recommend you start with Talent batteries until Boxking cleans up it's stuff. But there could be better and cheaper solutions now.

rev...ES-8. Holy heck ! You win the "In the Weeds" award this month. And apparently you are living MY fantasy ! Glad SOMEONE is... Well, I desperately strive for simplicity in equipment as a rule, but I've found even THAT is complicated in electric music ! So yes, I could see where that ES-8 could get VERY involved indeed...but it should give amazing control too. But are the AD/DA converters on the ins and outs completely transparent ? I suckered into the mono version of the Boss programmable EQ box and it lost something in the translation. That was a decade or so ago though, so I assume things have improved. But complexity ? Oh yeah. Music can be uber complex and I know that lesson well. Thank goodness I never had to earn a living from music ! But complexity to simplify something can be PRICELESS I think. I'm currently in my floorboard and preamp phase but they have the obvious limitations of uneven quality and quantity of effects and distortions, so they are a compromise for simplicity, and if I want better and more flexible sound I'll probably get a large router just to play 8 Pignoses at the same time for grins, and attempt to organize an unruly flock of pedals in the future. But you know the value of a complex pedal setup already. And I suspect you have quite an array of cool sounds at your fingertips...and who doesn't want that to play with ? Yep, that could be very interesting indeed ! Pedals can sound so different depending on where they are placed, and you can try all sorts of unusual combinations and stacks. Just gotta avoid exploding your brain !

ES-8 has NO A/D conversion, each loop is full analog, and has switchable input/output buffers at the front and end of the unit per-patch as well.  It will do true bypass on demand.

I also have a little 4-unit (not movable) MIDI-controlled switcher for 4 pedals at the end of the "master board" that's controllable with the ES-8 (and I have 4 footswitches hooked up so they're on/off per-patch too.

Well that right there is the poster child photo for an "unruly bunch of pedals"...I'd guess about 50 or 60 pounds !

And I had a similar unruly pedal mountain all designed to get my best sounds out of 3 guitars. I'm pretty particular about sound. But how would I carry all that stuff to a jam ? I could stuff it in a big case like the pros on Youtube, but then I remembered *duh* I'm not a Pro and never would be. So I compromised and downsized. But YOU probably could use a Pro case with rollers. Youtube shows all sorts of possible solutions. And you could probably run it off a couple Li-on battery packs as well. Might be less noisy and you wouldn't care about power surges, lighting strikes, brown outs and faulty wiring when you play out. But you could also power all the pedals AND the amps and have backup power if you invest in a large portable power station(1500 watts or so). I say this because when I lived "in the trees", I lost power 10 to 20 times a YEAR. Well, that's a fun looking bunch of tech there ! I'm going to look up the ES-8 and hope I don't get any G.A.S. symptoms...

ceder : each battery TYPE has it's own signature Voltage drop curve and starting Voltage value. For example, rechargeables start at 1.2v and gradually drop in voltage as you use them.(you need 6 batteries to produce 9v). Alkaline batteries start high, like 1.6V and you need 4 batteries to produce 9v. They also seem to last longer than carbon batteries(the cheap one's). The carbon batteries are cheap because they drop in voltage faster than the alkalines though they start around 1.6v or so. It is well known that a voltage drop can significantly affect distortion type pedals and I suggest you get a decent multimeter and test all your batteries to see what voltage they produce. In general, the lower the voltage, the lower the power left. Be aware though, that some batteries behave strangely...especially with rechargeables. They can show voltage but have little power. And all batteries are subject to possible flaws and failures. You might just have a bad battery. Also, not all pedals are the same. I've got the same devices from the same manufacturers and they require significantly different amounts of power ! But my guess is the wall wart is providing the current and voltage needed by your device, and the puny carbon battery can't. Or buy a pack of them and get ready to monitor and switch them out fairly quickly. Unless you find a germanium fuzz and like the sound of low voltage fuzz like Rev said ! And when you get the exact sound you want, wrap that battery up and only insert it just before performing your fuzz song. At the end of the song, or maybe in the middle of it, the battery will be dead ! LOL That's the old days for ya. Anyway, I doubt anyone uses a carbon battery for anything unless its the only one around. Works pretty good in Harbor Freight free flashlights though. Until they leak in a year or so...

Geez, I could get lost for 8 months in your amps and toys. At least ! Good thing I can't. I gotta get some other stuff done !

Guitar synth ? I didn't see one !

I use the old GR1 myself. Love those old analog sounds coming off my guitar strings ! So much easier on the speakers too...

And I have G.A.S. symptoms for the Boss sy-200. Dang thing isn't stereo though. How could they have skipped stereo ? Aargh.

Anyway, those sounds are different than the GR1 and don't seem to have much delay at all !

And of course, I WANT them. But no stereo ? Hmm. Should I wait for stereo or split the mono ? Decisions, decisions.

There's too much to fit in one pane.  My racks aren't there either, nor several of the amps, nor the racks of instruments.

The GR-55 is the last iteration of the 'external pickup' required guitar synth, and it's an amazing thing with no functional latency and amazing versatility - the integration of the Roland V-Guitar stuff and actual synth engines you can tweak.  It's not just "Trumpet 12" and you're stuck with it.



I haven't bothered with the SY-200 just because it's a step backwards from what I already have.   The only thing I wish they had done was make an upgraded GR-55 with the effects section of a GT-100 or GT-1000 (I have multiple GT-100 series units), as the GR-55's internal effects are the GT-10 era stuff that's not quite as good with a lot less flexibility.  It does wonders, mind you, but..it's comparatively limited in scope and quality, and can't be rearranged/routed.

It's a case of getting the setup right on them is vital (the pickup itself is more than the unit). The scale length settings on the 55 were essential (and why I finally pulled the plug on one as I could use a 24" monster for the first time).

It's also one where the guitar itself has to be in top form intonation-wise, which is where I was unsure that the Bass VI would work at all - it was in very good shape, but the oddity of "let's use a guitar pickup for bass" was a known unknown that Roland themselves hadn't tried.

The Bass VI is 30" scale, has guitar spacing on the neck, and is E to E, no lower strings. It's a hybrid beast, basically a Jaguar from hell.



And yea, the string types matter a ton. Thankfully, my stock stainless monsters I still have half a brick of (they're discontinued) work well, as do the Labella stainless rounds on the Bass VI.

Tuned down-GR55, you don't have to tell it's a bass, you can do +/- 24 per string tuning adjustments on a per-patch basis, and do Vguitar faux basses from Rick to Pbass to Jbass etc.

Now don't get me talking about the real oddballs.

I do have an Ibanez RGKP-6, after all!

GR-55 doesn't have issues with downtuned stuff that I've witnessed; there are two distinct patch modes for "guitar" and "bass" with different factory and user patch locations.

I don't use the GR-55 for much in the effects realm honestly - I have the racks and external multis and pedals for that!

It's pure synth and vguitar and pitch adjust-per-patch.

All the Bass VI switches are identical to the Jaguar - slider for each pickup, strangle switch for bass cut.

And the RGKP6 is a surreal 24-fret monster with a built in gain circuit and integrated Kaoss Pad.