Gator Mega Bone

With the huge and ever increas­ing pedal mar­ket offer­ing up new mod­els faster than you can keep up with play­ers have been more and more focused on their setups and keep­ing them together. The fas­ci­na­tion and need for a usable pedal lay­out has lead to many new pedal board designs and mak­ers to accom­mo­date a range of setups and lay­outs. Gator have long been mak­ing cases so pedal boards don’t seem to much of a stretch with the Mega Bone pedal board giv­ing you room for up to approx­i­mately ten stomp boxes, depend­ing on your setup, as well as includ­ing a daisy chain and power sup­ply to get you started.

There’s plenty of square and rec­tan­gle boards on the mar­ket both flat and angled com­ing in solid designs be it bars, flat with ris­ers, han­dles or a mul­ti­tude of other looks. Curved in a ‘H’ kind of lay­out Gator have gone for some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent with the Mega Bone with the premise being it wraps around your feet for easy access and com­fort­able use. The mid­dle sec­tion would hold per­haps three or four ped­als with the two ends being larger sized sec­tions and able to hand vol­ume ped­als, wahs and larger effects. It could also pro­vide two rows of smaller ped­als and the fact that it’s slightly curved/angled means you could still reach the back row with­out inter­fer­ing with the ped­als down front too much.  Made out of Poly­eth­yl­ene the mega bone is light and maneuverable yet still feels pretty rigid and should hold up to plenty of gig­ging. Keep­ing the player in mind Gator have also included a 9v daisy chain styled power sup­ply which can power quite a range of ped­als mean­ing you can get started almost straight away. Obvi­ously any­thing finicky or with spe­cific power needs will require some­thing dif­fer­ent but that’s the deal right across the board (pun intended!).  The whole thing comes in a light­weight carry bag that’s more than enough for throw­ing in the back seat and tak­ing to gigs or putting on your shoul­der for rehearsal.

Pedal board users will be famil­iar with the setup idea of hook and loop tape/Velcro for secur­ing your effects to your board. This option gen­er­ally proves pretty secure and is a good medium between fully secur­ing your ped­als which can be a pain if you re-jig your setup often (like many of us do!) so you can tin­ker with your chain and then stick them to your board, wire it up and you’re away. The curved design is a nice spin on the tra­di­tional rec­tan­gu­lar board shape and it does give a feel­ing of close­ness and being sur­rounded by your effects, per­haps also giv­ing some added angle and access to a few spots you might not have pre­vi­ously considered.