How much room do you need to stomp?

[R.G.]

Now comes the trickier companion question, and that is: How much "frontage" and "stompage" can the average player contend with on their pedal board?

Oh, sure, now ask a question I don't know the answer to!   

I'm reduced to falling back on my standard quip - define "average".   

In other words, when you consider the contents, intent, and dimensions of the average pedalboard, at what point are the switches/treadles too far away (hard left to hard right),

I think that presumes that the player will always have one foot planted firmly in one spot. It's easy to take what's known in dancing as a "grace step" and in martial arts as a "distance step", as long as you know which end of the board you're going to, and you haven't set up your pedalboard in a way that requires you to pick a hard left pedal and a hard right pedal as part of the same patch. 'Course, if you have set your pedalboard up that way, you're limited, as you note.

and at what point are there just too damn many things to step on?

You know that one, Mark. Seven to nine active choices are the most for the human mind to select without either long practice (e.g. fretboards) or thinking about it. Span of control, isn't it called?

I think what happens is that with gigantic pedalboards, the player uses less than seven changes most of the time and gets really good at those changes, and then flips in a few externals for the odd effect.

As a sidelight, I'm just back from the Dallas guitar show, where we had a lot of players in the booth asking about our dual pedals. The idea behind the dual pedals was that you could play a useful gig with only two (dual) pedals. The overdrive/distortion or the overdrive/compressor combined with the chorus/echo was flexible enough to be usable for a lot of setups. Add a cheat sheet of additional settings and it was even more flexible. One question that I came up with from that is the opposite - what's the *smallest* number of pedals one can make do with. And no, the answer is not "just one more...". 

What is the maximum front row to rearmost stompswitches/actuators distance that the average player can gracefully negotiate?  That's obviously not the responsibility of any single pedal-maker but individual pedals make up all those pedalboards.

Harder again. I think that a run through a human-factors handbook might turn up the limits on that one. The answer would be different for somebody like our old bass player who was 6'8" tall than for a shorter person, I think.

The actuators on the dual Visual Sound pedals are spaced so that you can easily miss one of them for single selection, but easily hit both of them for an instant "change sides" activation. It is a much more critical spacing when you have to be able to both hit only one button and also hit two adjacent ones if you like. That last criteria limits the maximum spacing to being no more than one button diameter less than the width of the soles of the shoes you use when playing.

When I made myself a multi-FX rackmount 20 years ago, and included 2 latching and 2 parallel non-latching switches in the foot-control unit, I made sure that the latching switches were on the outside and the non-latching ones were on the "inside", but spaced in the same manner: easy to hit just one, and easy to hit both if you wanted.

Thinking over this topic, I wonder if extension jacks for remote actuation of solid-state switches might, or even should, become a standard feature.  One of these days, I have to post a photo-essay of adapting a pedal in that way.

[Mark Hammer]

So let me ask you, was it a deliberate decision to set the jacks on the V2 series of Visual Sound pedals in a bit so as to let the pedals take up less room when laid out side by side?

[R.G.]

We get the "the dual pedals are too wide" comment all the time.

In fact the new V2 series dual pedals are slightly narrower side to side than the V1 series. In both cases they are narrower than two single normal sized pedals, being approached only by pedals with jacks at compatible heights to use the back-to-back plugs.

It's funny - I have had people insist that a dual pedal is wider than two ordinary pedals when we were standing beside a pedal board with a dual and two singles on it which showed the contrary. Even after being shown that, the person would insist that we were using extra wide plugs or something to make it come out that way. It's hard to believe just how much someone will hold onto a mistaken belief, even when shown the evidence. Scary, actually.

The inset was more to protect the ends of the jack and bushings from wear and tear than to try to make the case narrower, although all of those got consideration during the design. There isn't much about the V2 series design that wasn't a deliberate choice.