A Better Way to Feed Your Battery-powered Pedals

If you use vintage battery-powered pedals, you're familiar with two things: their responsiveness and how quickly the batteries run out. That said, players don't like taking their boards apart to change batteries all the time. With the Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply, it's possible to use your batteries without all of the related hassle. Load the power supply with four 9V batteries, connect to the power inlet, and get rocking! This power supply is intended for use with vintage overdrives, distortions, fuzzes, and wah pedals. But that doesn't mean you can't use select modern pedals. With this power supply on your board, you won't have to tear your pedalboard apart each time a battery dies. Instead, you can spend more time doing what you love — playing through your effects. Read on to see if the Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply is right for you.

How does it work?

On the surface, the Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply may seem like a super-simple device. However, there's a very brilliant thought behind the design and serious processing power under the hood. The Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply system takes advantage of the nature of carbon batteries. Usually labeled as "Heavy Duty" or "Super Heavy Duty" at dollar stores, carbon batteries can't feed huge amounts of current to a pedal. So, when your overdrive needs to draw a lot of power, the battery experiences a drop in voltage and a restriction in current that's very similar to how rectifier tubes or power transformers react with a burst of signal sending them into clipping. While alkaline and lithium-ion batteries can work with this power supply, and we recommend that you use carbon batteries.

How fast will I run through batteries?

Don't worry: you won't burn through batteries with the Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply. Vertex thought of that, too. All you need to do is connect an outlet from your power supply to the input of the Vertex Battery Power supply. This will power the built-in Active Current Sensing technology that automatically shuts off the battery outputs when it notices that the rest of your pedalboard is turned off and unplugged from the AC adapter. While you can use it in standalone mode, we recommend that you use it in conjunction with another pedalboard power supply.

How do I know it's for me?

The Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply is intended for vintage pedals and boutique re-creations modeled after them. However, there are certain modern pedals that can benefit from using this system! Verifying if your pedal could benefit from 9V battery power is easy. Simply connect it to a standard power supply and turn the effect on. Next, unplug the power cable from the effect and watch how quickly the LED light turns off. If the pedal turns off immediately, it's a good match for the Vertex Effects Battery Power Supply. If your pedal turns off slowly, you can still use it with the Battery Power Supply, but it will have the same "sag" in performance.