Stereo Amplifiers And Thinking Double Mono Instead?

Remember your first practice amp?

Was it a brand you only saw once and that once was on that amp?

Did it never really sound all that clean? Did the distortion feedback like crazy past 6 on the dial?

Whether it was for bass or guitar, one thing is usually true - the amp basically sucked.

I barely remember my first amp…

…but I remember my first half stack loudly.

it was a Marshall 1960 slanted cab with a used JCM900 in the era of my friends having Mesa Dual Recs.

The beast was phenomenal - even more so with a tube screamer in front to tighten it up like so many of us do to chug and pinch harmonic our way to awesomeness.

Combo Amps are the real workhorse.

City living might mean getting the best headphones on the market and going digital to an extent.

When I was gigging the most in NYC, I usually used a 100 watt Marshall Valvestate of my own. If available, I would use an amp from a venue’s back line. Many times it was just easier to do that and not make a frenemy of the person working the soundboard for the evening.

As a result of not having a steady amp always, I opted to go pedal based for my distortions and overdrives. I even aimed for having a board that gave me everything and only needed minor tweaking on the amp EQ itself.

There was also a reverb pedal at the end of the chain going into the front of the amp because the 4 cable method was not always feasible on a small stage or during a short set to justify the longer set up time.

All of those amps were mono!

One day I was experimenting with an Electro Harmonix Memory Man in a large room at Ultrasound Studios in NYC. There was an amp I had never tried before but knew some of my friends loved or hated via beer drenched post jamming chatter.

Stereo for me used to mean using 2 different amps, one left and one right to create a washing over you fullness if you did it right. “Instant Edge” but not really.

I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

Roland Jazz Chorus

Cleanest amp ever. For me at least. Some call it sterile and I call it a warm palette that I don’t need to change tubes every so often. Cold weather and travel affected my tube amps more than anything which pushed me to solid state with the Marshall Valvestate but the JC-120 from Roland is stereo. As a delay fanatic - stereo in one amp meant less to carry to gigs!

Soon, the realization was clear - one amp, stereo for my delays and choruses.

Cool.

Beyond Stereo Logic

Aside from the fact that a true stereo spread was not exactly there as when I used 2 amps - I was pretty thrilled with the sounds and clean palette I had available. From time to time, I would swap in and out a variety of drive pedals and could truly hear them with distinction.

An amp with a preamp gain section usually adds color and a tube compression which is fantastic and beloved for all the right reasons. In those years, I had a belief that the clean tone needed to be pristine as possible in order to make your heavy tone that much more crushing by contrast.

Back to the point -

The Roland JC for me has become a way to technically have 2 different tones live, in one place. Using a Line 6 HX Effects and with clever routing, you can run different signal paths with real time control.

Plug in your 2 cables to the amp from the Left and Right outputs on the back - you can go mono into the front, no issues there. Within the HX Edit software or from the HX Effects front panel, you can easily adjust everything to your spec.

For example -

I will route a Compressor (as a mono FX block) to a split stereo path, one side might go to an Industrial Fuzz and the other might go to more a Compulsive Drive. Inside the routing path I will make sure the paths go 100% to the left and 100% to the right in order to keep them separated once they reach the stereo inputs of the amp.

Drive pedals are one thing to vary for sure between the 2 signal paths but what if you add a unit like the Mimiq from TC Electronic! Suddenly now you can increase again the stereo spread but this time via an algorithm that seemingly fakes the feel of a second player shadowing your playing but with subtle dynamic changes to fool our ears.

-PedalEffected.com