I know there's a Dual Amp / Two Amp setups thread, but the question was never debated as to the superiority of such things. What's your ideal: single mono coming from one direction, dual (or more) mono spread around the room/stage, dual stereo spread, or wet/dry/wet (which sounds like something from a diaper commercial)? Go off about it!

I've been playing guitar in stereo since the late 2000s. It's partly because at this age my ears are no longer a matched pair, as the hearing damage affects different freqs and levels on each side. But it's mainly to overcome things like directional beaming and other factors that take away from sounding like I do in my studio and on a good recording. I'm talking about my live analog rig, not in-the-box amp modeling (though I do use analog and digital cab modelers for recording). I have enough amps to do a wet/dry/wet but I'm not gonna splurge on the Roland/EVH 3-way delay pedal or otherwise overcomplicate my pedalboard to do so, though it might be fun to try some day. Even if I played mono it'd still end up as a stereo track once I started working in my DAW anyway, so it makes sense to have it that way live as well. I record the other guitarist in Escape Rope with a mono cab modeler, but once it's in Logic I use a stereo split effect to send different frequencies to L and R, as well as some stereo reverb in the final mix, so what I'm saying is it's a binaural world and we're just tracking in it.

I've never liked 2 amp setups unless the amps are doing extremely different things, like when I was playing a lot of Baritone guitar, I had a Peavey Musician 400 into a single 15" with my little 20 watt Epiphone with the spring reverb cranked sitting on top. All the Effects that were not distortion went into the epiphone clean and all the fuzz and distortion went through the bass amp with no other effects. There was a volume pedal in line with the Epiphone so I could swell in the "wet" amp. Sounded super cool.

When it is 2 amps just doing stereo I feel like it is a total waste of space and time.

The best I ever got out of it was either using long rhythmic delays (doing a side-to-side DUN....DUN effect) or using one side for the loop/sample then playing off it with the live guitar. Otherwise.. yeah, it can kinda just be an elaborate volume knob.

I experimented with two different amps a long time ago. This was peak pedal board Grammy. I had a JCM900 and a Bassman split, pedal madness… after a while I was much happier with a Mesa Mark I, a RAT and an SG..

I think I mentioned this in a Tech room thread but once I recorded a dude with a 3 amp rig that had different pedal setups for each amp with a fancy midi switcher to switch multiple shit on and off at the same time. The issue was, different pedals will flip your phase. So sometimes in the middle of a song, amp 3 would be 180 out form the other 2, then 2 would go in phase with 3, and 1 was out, then they all would be back in phase. I had to keep my ears on a swivel the whole time and cut and flip phase on portions of the tracks every time he hit his stupid switches. Add to this the bass player came in with a 70% is good enough but only played 56%, and it became one of the worst projects I've ever worked on. Crap.

Plenty of ABY pedals and other switchers have phase switches on them nowadays so that shouldn’t have been an issue. If dude had an elaborate setup then he should have invested in phase correction.

I'm ready to go back to the honky-tonk rig of rhythm and lead players sharing one amp.

I'm back to two amps as I think I mentioned in the other thread. The frickin drummer of the other band asked how I get my tone at the last show. There's a lot of dual mono and occasional stereo delay. As I've mentioned before the combination of two tone profiles, two gain levels and spread across a stage just does something. You can make it feel loud without having to even reach the decibels.

Having a 2x12 stack and a 1x12 combo amp keeps me from feeling super sheepish about overkill.

My favorite live tone in recent memory was a friend who put an AC30 on top of a Jazz Chorus. Much greater contrast than my two amps but he got it to sound so saturated yet so articulate at the same time.

ChudFusk wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 3:12 pm Plenty of ABY pedals and other switchers have phase switches on them nowadays so that shouldn’t have been an issue. If dude had an elaborate setup then he should have invested in phase correction.

In the room it doesn't really sound like a giant problem, but when close mic'd you can t really feel it when one of the amps shifts out of the other 2. The problem was was he had like 4 different distortion pedals for each amp and it was a total crap shoot to which ones would shift the polarity. He also isn't a super "skilled" or technically savvy player, he just decided to plug in ALL of his shit for this dumb band he is in. He cannot be dissuaded from the more is more philosophy. Shoe Gazers... what ya gonna do? As much of a disaster as his guitar rig was, fixing the terribly played bass was the worst part. Took forever. Chopping, moving, pitch shifting the DI track and then having to reamp and re-record it all back in so it sounded "real". Terrible.

^ as an engineer this is nightmare material.