The Ultimate Small Board? T-Rex ToneTrunk Minor + One Control Distro Kit!

In this video, we check out a fantastic compact pedalboard solution for mounting and powering your guitar pedals! The ToneTrunk Minor (T-Rex) and the Tiny Power Distributor Kit (One Control) could just be the new dynamic duo in the world of travel-sized, lightweight pedalboards. How do they stack up with the competition? Let's take a look and find out!

Products Mentioned

T-Rex ToneTrunk Minor: https://www.t-rex-effects.com/tonetrunk-soft-case
​One Control Distro Kit: https://www.one-control.com/switcher/distro-tiny-power-distributor-

Video Transcript

Hi, you’re here with Luke from GuitarIQ.com. I'm right in the middle of building two brand new pedalboards and I thought now would be a great opportunity to take a bit of a time out and to show you some of the key elements that I'm using to bring these pedalboards to life. If you saw my last video, you’ll know that I unboxed a bunch of stuff to use with a bigger board that I've got planned for the studio. With these pedal boards I wanted to do something different. I wanted to build two independent pedalboards: One for electric guitar and one for acoustic guitar. And I wanted them to be a lot smaller, more lightweight, compact, and ‘fly-rig’ compatible.

Right, so here's a sneak peek at the electric board that I've just finished building and it looks a little like this (or exactly like this even). I'm not going to talk about the pedals that I've used here or explain how I've built it. I’ll certainly be showcasing both of these boards that I'm putting together in some future videos—if you're interested in that. Today I wanted to talk about the actual pedalboard that I've gone for itself and the power supply that I'm using to power everything. When it comes to pedalboards and power supplies there are so many different options out there. And it took me a bit of searching around to find what was going to meet my needs. So hopefully this can help you out if you're in a similar boat and looking to build a compact rig.

Now, when I first started putting the electric board together I actually started using a different board. It was a smaller board, it was a low-profile board, it was well built, it came with a nice case. It was a similar style board to some of the PedalTrain options that are out there—if you're familiar with them. But what I found was it just didn't really suit how I wanted the board to work and how I wanted things to come together. So I went back on the good, old Googles and I found this bad boy. I was so impressed with it that I reached out to the Australian distributor and they very kindly sent me another board to feature on the acoustic rig that I'm just about to build. So what is this mysterious, mystical board that I speak of? It is the Tone Trunk Minor by T-Rex.

Now, the Tone Trunk Minor is the smallest board that T-Rex build—they build some bigger boards as well. I really like that these boards are a solid, one-piece metal design. This is a lightweight aluminum (or aloominium) depending on where you are in the world. It looks nice, as you can see, and it comes with this nice soft case. It’s got some padding on the inside there to offer some protection for your pedals. And it's got this great little pocket underneath where you can store some extra patch cables or some guitar leads or other accessories you might need—which is a handy add-on to the board. I probably wouldn't do any serious touring or flying with this but just for going from a spare room, to the back of your car, to the rehearsal, to the gig this is going to be more than fine for most users. So that's a nice handy add-on for the board.

That’s not why I bought the board though. What I really like about this pedalboard, other than the build quality and the little case it comes with, is the design of it. It seemed to be just a little bit bigger than some of the other boards that I was looking at. And that extra 5 to 10 centimetres of width allowed me to fit everything on the pedalboard that I wanted to use in my rig. Additionally, to the width of the board, you can see that this board is a riser design, which means there's an air gap under the board where I can mount a power supply. Now, the reason why that's so important is a lot of the other boards I was looking at were that low profile design. Which means you have to mount the power supply on top of the board. Which is fine, it just takes up your precious pedalboard real estate that you can use for other things—like pedals for example. And specifically, in the context of building a smaller compact-style rig, that pedalboard real estate is really important.

And speaking of power supplies and minimizing space, and you know… making the most of your real estate. I wanted to also show this unit here. This is the Distro All-In-One Pack from One Control—it’s a power supply. Now, I first came across this when I did a review of their Agamidae Tail loop—which is a nice compact pedal switching unit (which I'll be using on my bigger studio board). They also sent me one of these out to check out and I was a little bit dubious about it because it is absolutely tiny. I’m used to much bigger power supplies with a big transformer, and isolated outputs, and a big chunky design. And this thing as you'll see in a minute is absolutely tiny. The first thing I did when I got it was powered up with a bunch of different pedals, both analog and digital, and I was really surprised with just how well it worked. I thought it would be the perfect accompaniment for these smaller lightweight boards that I'm putting together.

This is a brand new unit so I thought I would do a bit of an unbox to show you what's in here. In the All-In-One Pack, you get a bunch of cables these are different lengths which is handy when you're building a pedalboard. It comes with the main power supply, which rather handily is a universal power supply. So this powers anything from uh 100 to 240 volts (theoretically this should work anywhere in the world you just need the right adapter to go with the outlet that you're using). Obviously, I can only attest to its functionality down here in Australia but it works well Down Under, at least.

This is the actual power supply in question. Again, it comes packaged like so, there’s a bit of a manual thing, and here it is. When I take it out of the box, you can see just how small this thing is. It's the width of a couple of my fingers. It's incredibly lightweight, it does feel very well built and solid, it can power up to nine pedals, and it provides I think about 2000 milliamps—which for me is enough juice to power everything that I'm looking to use with it. You can actually link these together so you can have multiple running in series if you need more outputs and more juice. Which is a handy little feature—not something I'm needing for these boards. And apart from the eight 9 volt outputs, this additional output is 12 to 18 volts and it has this little ‘sag’ dial where you can set exactly how much voltage you want, which is really handy. Now most pedals only take 9 volts but there are some pedals like this SP Compressor and this EP Booster that can take up to 18 volts. So it's really handy to have that option on a tiny little power supply like this. To be clear, you want to make sure that any pedal can handle 18 volts before you run 18 volts in it. Or, you’ll just end up blowing up the pedal—just a little disclaimer right there!

And last, but certainly not least, is just how well this power supply works with this pedalboard. Now these companies, as far as I know, are completely independent from each other. But I couldn't have designed that any better if I tried—to fit underneath that lip it's a beautiful thing, as you can see there.

​So that's all I really wanted to talk about in this video. Before I build the next board, I just wanted to show you those bits and pieces—before they're all kind of connected in there. Hopefully, that at least points you in the right direction or gives you some helpful things to work from if you're looking to build a compact rig yourself. As I said, there are tons of options out there so do your research but hopefully this video at least helps you out a little bit. If so, give me a thumbs up on YouTube. If you're interested to see these pedalboards in their full glory, then make sure you subscribe to the channel to check these out in some later videos. If you're interested in some of my educational books for guitar players then head over to GuitarIQ.com where you can check them out over there. That's it for this video, I need to go and keep building some pedalboards, so we'll leave it there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video!