Dogs and effects have two factors in common — they both need leads and they both like to go walkies. Okay, the average canine can wander where it likes, but it can be distinctly inconvenient when you find your fuzz box ambling ever closer to the edge of the stage each time you land a boot on it.

Pedals should stay where they're put, in neat rows, and to this end several music companies have produced effects boards of varying expense and sophistication. I suppose the original master of this technique was Pete Cornish who would custom-build boards, sometimes nine foot square but only a couple of inches high.

The artist, tired of pursuing his gadgets across the floor, would bring all his favourite pedals to Pete along with instructions on how he wanted them connected. The circuits would be pulled out, rehoused and given a suitably transformed mains power supply.

The resulting constructs had a remarkable reputation for toughness and reliability — not hard to understand when you realise Pete Cornish's first job was a military one, designing and building radios that could be parachuted into desert terrain, survive 24 hours in the blazing heat, and work first time.

Yamaha didn't have exactly those conditions in mind when they blueprinted their SB200 board, but I have been to venues that don't stray too far from that description. The SB200 is capable of taking eight Yamaha pedals in its bottom section and three in the top (or two if one of them is the wider Analogue Delay).

Yamaha launched their all black effects and frames onto the market at the same time. The pedals are fairly standard in range — phasers, flangers, compressors etc — and have a silvery pad at the front acting as the on/off switch, an input on the right, output on the left plus a status LED.

The board has a basket of tricks such as a built-in lead tester, a lamp on a goose neck to illuminate the pedals, plus an LED display for the output level. On the SB200 there's also a field of 44 — I said 44 — jack sockets to reach each of the pedals in the chain and rearrange their order without taking the frame apart. £599

The Boss SCC700 has a more elegant solution to the problem, thanks to our old pal the microprocessor. It can remember 32 different ways of patching together seven effects and call up any one at the press of a single switch.

The SCC700 comes in two parts — an effects store that could be tucked out of sight on the stage, and a remote controller that in one mode provides a switch for each effect and in another selects the memorised patches.

The memories are arranged in four banks of eight. One pad on the remote controller steps through the banks, the appropriate number appearing in an LED readout, and eight further pads in two tiers select the programmes. The SCC700 is able to remember not only what effects you want on, but how they should be connected — fuzzed chorus sounds different from chorused fuzz — and how loud the output of each should be, for example, to underrun a fuzz box and change the quality of the distortion or ensure "choosy" pedals like octave dividers are delivered a healthy signal.

And the Boss has a branching facility like the Yamaha's jack field, that can take out part of the signal after certain units — useful when you've got a stereo pedal. All these parameters are set by touching the right pressure sensitive coloured squares on the main board, which is much easier to understand than the possibilities would lead you to think.

Once a patch has been called up it can still be edited in mid gig by hitting the M (for Modify) pad on the controller. Pads 1 to 7 now represent the effects themselves which can be brought in or out at will, without altering the information in the memory... though in practice you have to delete units one at a time, in the reverse order to the way they were programmed. You couldn't just knock out the graphic from a fuzz/graphic/chorus chain.

The main board comes on a flight case base ready to take its protective top and is of course mains powered. Two angled jack plugs rise from the surface to connect the inputs and outputs of each pedal and although it's designed around Boss modules, you could squeeze on similarly shaped rival devices at a pinch, or leave them free-standing and take two flying leads into the back of the microprocessor signal router. £1000