For years I've been a fan of Guitar Geek, the guitar rig database. The site admins draw realistic looking gear mockups of many popular guitarists, with painstakingly manually-drawn mini representations of different amps, pedals, etc.
That's so the rest of us can spend our hard earned money buying the same gear our heroes use. 
Unfortunately the site looks like it hasn't been updated in several years.
So one day when I was bored, I decided to do a mockup of my rig, similar to what they do on the site, using the drawing tools in Excel. I'm sharing it with you so you can see some of the tools Excel has for drawing and managing different objects on the worksheet. Although I believe there are actually better tools out there for drawing (PowerPoint? Visio? AutoCAD?). Here's a screenshot of about 80% of it:
This rendering is almost identical to the actual physical layout of my gear. The basic idea is : Guitar » pedal board » effects » amp. But obviously, there's much more detail to be had.
The drawing toolbar is your friend if you want to create something like this. Go to View » Toolbars and select "Drawing", then click "AutoShapes". There's a tear-off menu called "Basic Shapes" which I used to create most of the objects you see. For the amps, speaker cabinets, and pedals, I used:
- Rounded Rectangle
- Oval
- Rectangle
The toolbar has a button called "Shadow Style" which has a tear-off menu ("Shadow Settings") used to create the shadows behind the pedals and the speakers.
Objects like the pedal board and speaker cabinet are actually composite objects made up of dozens of smaller objects. However if you click and drag the pedal board or the speaker cabinet around, you'll see everything move together. That is due to the "Grouping" feature, which you will find if you right-click on any of the objects.
To group all of the objects together in the speaker cabinet, all I had to do was draw and arrange the elements to look like a speaker cabinet, then Ctrl-click each of the elements, right-click and select "Grouping" » "Group". Now the objects are grouped together and move as one. If you later added a new element and wanted it to be grouped with the rest, just select the already-grouped object along with the new element, and repeat the grouping step; the new element will be added to the group.
If you did try to move any of the objects, you might also have noticed that the arrows move as well. That is another neat feature of the Drawing toolbar » AutoShapes, on the Connectors tear-off menu. Click the "Elbow Arrow Connector" and then hover over an object to see where you can anchor the arrow base. Click it, then mouse over to another object to see the path the arrow will take. Click again to complete the connection. The arrow will stay connected to both objects, and auto-adjusts if you move either object.
Here's the signal path. Hope it's not too confusing!
- Guitar » pedal board input #1
- Pedal board input #1 » volume pedal
- Volume pedal » wah-wah (vol pedal has tuner output for silent tuning. Tuner itself ouputs to harmonizer pedal, which needs clean signal for note tracking)
- Wah-wah » compressor » overdrive » pedal board output #1
- Pedal board output #1 » Amp input
- Amp speaker out runs through THD Hot Plate 16 ohm setting, then to speaker cab modded to output to all four speakers at once
- Amp effects loop goes to pedal board input #2, then to Harmonizer
- Harmonizer output is split between chorus pedal and A/B box
- Chorus » Noise gate » Digital Delay
- Dry output of digital delay goes to pedal board output #2 and back to effects loop, wet output goes to A/B box
- A/B box takes harmony and delay signal and splits them to two amps: a small Marshall practice amp and Fender tube amp
The Hot Plate allows you to crank your amp (read: volume on four is LOUD) to get maximum distortion at low volumes, so your neighbors won't be calling the police.
The Crybaby is set at its second-to-lowest setting, to emulate the live sound Dave Murray (Iron Maiden) gets. Trust me, if you want to sound like him, get that pedal and follow these instructions carefully.
The SKB pedal board was actually purchased from April Malmsteen, Yngwie's wife, and it was used on tour. I have the paperwork to prove it 
And completely by coincidence (really!), much of my gear is modeled after my hero, Dave Murray of Iron Maiden 
Specifically the wah pedal, Marshall JCM 2000 and the stock 1960 cabinets he currently uses.
About JP
2 Comments:
Cool. Maybe try this. I've seen some pretty cool stuff realized with this application.
http://sketchup.google.com/
Cute, but way too professional for my needs
I like the video demo, looks like something that would take a few hours to learn. If I ever wanted to redo the workbook, I'll definitely check out that tool.
Thx