Clean to Mean Rack Tones 12/27/25

[mentoneman]

Full amps or nothing for me!

in agreement that a well designed head is unrivaled, but having messed with enough stuff, i’ve concluded that amp head switching is not in the cards for me.
the flexibility and convenience i get with preamp/power amp rigs put me firmly in that camp.

this was the rig neal schon used when i saw him with soul sirkus

and it sounded horrible. it was a wash of reverb.

this was his more recent rig

not sure if this is what he was using last Saturday but his tone was much nicer this time!

 

[Anje]

Agree it's a great thing we have so many different good gear options those days, so that one can pick what suits his needs best. There's not one size fits all for sure.

On my side, I've never really liked "switching" at the amp / core tone level; the simpler the main amp(s) the better, and I also prefer to have as much of a "coherent" sound for all my parts / as smooth transition as possible between all my variations of clean / dirty & rythme / lead, live at least.
When I have the luxury to use several amps, I usually not switch between them live; I use them to build my core tone, in a multi-mono / wet/dry / stereo manner, and roll my guitar controls & misc effects in front for different sounds & colors.
An Eric Johnson type of A/B rig is the most "amp / core tone switching" I'd be ok with live, and still I've never really be 100% comfortable with such drastic change of core sound between clean / dirty in a live band situation.

Recording in the studio and layering parts/sounds is a different thing indeed.

 

[Dave L]

I have a two-way amp switcher in my rack, but it´s mostly just for workflow. Since I only use this stuff at home now everything goes into a Suhr Reactive Load, so the switcher mainly keeps me from having to get around the back to unplug the Soldano and VHT I have in the rack when I want to use an external head instead. And also for safety, if I started moving cables around all the time I just know I would fire up one thing and start playing and have another amp actually going into the load. Especially after a few glasses of wine

If the time comes when I use live cabs again, I´ll wire it up like I did before with the choice of a loaded head or the preamp, and everything running thru the VHT powering the cabs. Well, it would be two heads into the load now, with the switcher I didn´t have then.

 

[Jakem]

Who is making midi controllable amp/cab switchers other than KHE Audio these days?

 

[Dave L]

Kahayan, N-Audio, Ampete just to name a few off the top of my head.