How It Starts
At some point every electric guitarist these days stumbles across the amazing studio musicians that create content for YouTube. Just watch Tim Pierce, RJ Ronquillo or Pete Thorn and you’ll soon have amp fever, lusting after their quick multi-head amp switching systems. After my experiments with various cabs, leading to my decision to go with all head and cab amps instead of combos, I started looking at these switching systems.
At the same time I am a huge fan and constant watcher of That Pedal Show, where Dan and Mick have taught me about the joy that is a wet/dry rig. Having one amp run all the gain pedals and another running gain plus all the time and modulation effects gives a huge soundstage that doesn’t wash out you main tone. Trying different combinations of amps for each role has led to some very interesting and inspiring tones that would not have been otherwise possible.
The Problem with Most Switchers
But this has led to a bit of a problem. All of the top amp/cab switcher are pretty much mono, and even running 2 of them would mean having to split my amps into two groups ahead of time (I don’t have many amps, so that would make it pretty pointless). Just as I was about to bite the bullet and go full mono from now on, I came across a brand I’d never heard of before in a forum post.
De Lisle to the Rescue
De Lisle makes a number of switching solutions, some more basic than the often-proposed devices. In fact, the amp and cab switched I ended up with is a fully passive device that simply lets you switch any of the 8 cabs to any of the 8 amps. Its only safety measure is a passive load that protects an amp if it’s not connected to a speaker, but even then, only if you don’t send a signal to the amp.
So it’s not fancy, doesn’t have midi control and won’t let you swap between a bunch of amps while playing to try out various tones. What it does do is let me set any amp that is connect to any cabs that are connected. If the amp could handle it, I could run all 8 cabs to one amp. More importantly, I can run any amp to any cab at the same time, making any wet/dry combination possible without having to go behind and re-wire my cabs.
Not only has this wonderful device made experimenting more fun and easy, it’s also breathed new life into my Mesa Boogie Triple Crown as I play it way more often now that I don’t have to hook it up every time I want to play it.
Which only leaves one last question, which head should I buy next. Ok, maybe that one is already answered as well.
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