 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MGRmusic.com and in this video we're going to talk about building a stereo rig and all the different combinations you can use when you're using multiple amps. So for the video today I'm going to be using two Blackstar amplifiers. I have got the Studio 10 6R6 on one side and the HT20 Mark II on the other side. To really hear the detail in this video it's best to listen to this on a good set of speakers or on headphones because I've got the Studio 10 6R6 panned fully to the left and the HT20 Mark II panned fully to the right. So you can hear the width that the stereo field adds when I put both amps on at the same time. So you're hearing both the amps mic'd up with exactly the same mic which is an Aston Origin condenser mic. I've got a couple of pedals in front of me as well that we'll talk about as we go through the video. So we're going to be looking at a bunch of different ways you can chain your amps together but first of all we need to understand the difference between mono and stereo. So mono is when you have one signal path so in this case that's guitar through the pedals straight into one amplifier. The benefits to a mono setup are that it's super simple and super easy to use. There's nothing really that you need to worry about with phase issues or balancing levels it's just one direct path. A mono setup also makes it easy to chop and change gear. So if you want to change amps for a gig it's very easy to just swap out the amp because it's the last thing in the chain. Even if you're using the FX looper ramp it's still mono because you've just got one continuous signal from guitar to the amp at the end. So I'm going to be using this switch pedal here to switch between the two amplifiers. When the A light here at the bottom is on you're hearing the Studio 10 6R6 and when the B light is on you're hearing the HT20 Mark II. When both lights are on together you will hear both amps at once. So you're going to hear the Studio 10 6R6 through the left speaker or the left headphone and the HT20 Mark II through the right side. Pandem this way so when we get to the stereo stuff and we talk about using stereo effects you can really hear the movement and the width but first of all let's talk about mono. So I've just got some simple mono signal chain setup here so here is the Studio 10 6R6 clean and now here is the HT20 Mark II completely clean. So you'll notice I've got the amps EQ'd very differently and this is one of the reasons why people would use a stereo setup. So I've got the Studio 10 6R6 quite bright very American voiced and I've got the HT20 Mark II with a bit more of a mid-push a lot warmer and the ISF is over to the British side so there's a very different contrast between the two amps. Now in a mono setup like I said you would just pick one or the other so if I was going to a gig and I wanted an American sound I would have this little mono signal chain I've got here straight into the Studio 10 6R6. So on the pedal board I've got a Blackstar LT dual overdrive, a stereo multi modulation pedal from Boss and a Walrus Mako D1 stereo delay. The switcher then like I said is just acting as the AB between the two amplifiers. So when we talk about stereo effects those are only coming into play when we have both amps on at the same time. In this state everything you hear is going to be mono so let's see some modulation in a mono setup. So I'm going to start off with the Studio 10 and then I will switch between the two and you'll see on the screen which one I'm switching between. I also want to point out that the reverb is coming from each amplifier so you will hear some slight differences in the reverb used. I've got the stock reverb from the amps both set at the same level but each amp has its own independent reverb circuit. So now that we know what mono is and what a mono modulated sound sounds like we can start talking about a common way of using two amps which is known as dual mono. This is probably the first way most people start to think about stereo guitars even though technically dual mono is not actually stereo. Actually two mono amps played at the same time. The reason this is called dual mono and not stereo is because of the definition of stereo. Stereo by default is a wide sound from multiple sources which see multiple input signals. So for instance your favorite hi-fi is probably stereo because it's sending different pieces of information to different speakers. So for instance if you've got one guitar panned one side one guitar panned the other that is typically stereo. So you're technically hearing this in stereo because you are hearing different pieces of information in each year or each speaker that you're hearing this from but it's technically not stereo at this end because I'm sending the same signal to both amps. So what I mean by that is my guitar is going directly through the overdrive through the modulation through the delay and then it is getting split by the selector here. So at this point the same content is coming out of everything and just getting split. There is nothing that changes the signal before each output. When you use a pedal with a stereo output that's where this changes. So for instance this delay pedal has a stereo out. I've only got this plugged out of the mono out at the moment but when I have the stereo output set up you'll actually hear some differences in both sides. That's because the pedal is actually sending different information left and right. So what you can hear now is dual mono so I'm going to go through the overdrive, the delay and the modulation tones again and the clean tones but you'll hear two different amp sounds but we're sending the same signal to both amps. So just as a refresher on the left side you've got the studio 10 on the right side you've got the HD 20 and then both together. So dual mono setup is great if you want to use two different amps that are EQ'd slightly different like I'm doing right now. You get two different flavors of tone and this is great for getting a big fat sound on stage. It works especially well with overdriven tones like this. All right so now we're going to look at some modulation in dual mono mode so I'm going to turn on a chorus effect. Typically in a stereo chorus we would have some movement and this actually applies to any stereo modulation effect. We would have some movement between the speakers. In this case because we're not splitting until after the effect we're going to hear the same signal on both sides so that means we're still going to get a big wide sound but we're not going to get that left and right movement that you would typically get in an actual stereo setup. So if I had that setup in full stereo you would hear some variation between the left and right speaker. In this case you didn't you hear the exact same thing going on in both speakers the only difference you did here was the EQ of the amps. This is very important when it comes to differentiating between dual mono and stereo. The reason for this is stereo actually allows for movement between the left and right side whereas dual mono does not. They both sound great but it's just picking which one is best for your rig. The same is also true for delay so this delay I'm using here is a stereo delay. I've got this set on dual mode right now which is a dual delay. It's got a long and a short repeat. In mono mode what this is doing is it's summing both of those delays down to one output and then sending it wherever it needs to go. Because of the way this is cabled the delay pedal is doing this because it thinks it's running in mono. It's only detecting one output so it's summing both of those down like I said and then the splitter is doing the rest. So what we're hearing here is both delays in both amps so again we're not going to hear any variation between the two other than those of the EQ. So you can hear we're getting the same delay repeats out of both sides. In a true stereo setup you would have the long delay on one side and the short delay on the other side. Dual mono is great for people who want a simple fake stereo setup so it definitely adds width to your sound because you've got those two different tonal textures depending on what amps you're using. You can dial the EQs differently to get a huge range of tones. These setups work great with overdrive as well so if you're playing it with a lot of gain you get a real fat rock sound. So demonstrate that I'm going to use the higher gain side of the LT dual so we're going to hear a higher gain sound through both of these amps. So you can really see the EQ gives it a big fat sound great for gigs because you can have two different amps like I said a lot of gain it really fends the sound up very nicely. You can also chop and change amps really easy because again you're not really too worried about your stereo field and a big advantage of that is if one of your amps goes down when you're on stage that's fine you don't lose your entire signal. All you lose is part of your EQ spectrum so the way I've got this kind of setup is the Studio 10 is a sort of more top end focused amp much more American sounding and the HD 20 is dealing with the lows a bit more a bit more of that British mid-range. If one of those to go down and I was playing with this setup I would just lose that part of it so if the Studio 10 went down for instance I could just bump the treble on the HD 20 and get back in the same sort of tonal ballpark that I was in before one of them went down so it's much more of a safe option for gigs I think. I personally love a dual mono setup you don't get that movement between left and right but again it does kind of safeguard you. If you're using a full stereo setup and one of the amps goes down that sweep you get between the left and right which we're going to talk about very soon will completely go so you'll just have the effect and then it will kind of vanish so it's not the best situation to be in when one goes down but you know that doesn't happen too often. So another cool thing you can do with a dual mono rig is a wet dry signal so if we look at the pedal board now we can see that I've slightly rewired this the delay is actually now at the end so I'm coming through mono here through the overdrive through the modulation into the selector this is now splitting my mono guitar signal one of which is going straight out so that is going to the HT20 Mark II the first output for the Studio 10 6R6 is now hitting the delay so you're not hearing the delay through the HT20 you're only now hearing it through the Studio 10 this is another great way to sort of thicken and widen guitar sounds you can also do this with modulation as well you could have like a chorus or a phaser on one side and a dry amp on the other side this works great because you can dial in like I've done here a very short delay what this does is it just further thickens up your tone if you think back to the video we did a few months ago where we talked about using delay to thicken your tone and kind of give that two guitar impression this does the same sort of job this sounds great with both clean and overdriven tones so let's take a look so you're going to hear the dry tone on the right side and the delay on the left side so that slapback is great for thickening widening and also creating some extra ambience also sounds great like I said with some overdriven tones so if I go over to the high gain side of the LT dual we're going to get a much fatter wider guitar sound with a slight delay on the left another thing I can do there which is quite cool if you really want to go down this road is on the delay I can turn the mix control all the way up if your delay has a wet dry setting what I can now do is I can make one amp completely wet and one amp completely dry so all the dry signal is coming from the HT 20 and all you're going to hear from the studio 10 if I just show you that on its own is just the delay signal so when you put those together so now we're going to talk about a fully stereo setup so a fully stereo setup involves different signals coming out of the inputs going to different sources so in this case I'm coming stereo now out of my boss MD 200 which is a multi modulation pedal the MD 200 in stereo mode is going to send a slightly different signal to both the left and the right sides so as you go between the left and right sides you're going to hear some variation in what's going on I've actually got a tremolo effect with some pan on it just to demonstrate this so what you're going to hear through both headphones is the dry guitar signal but you're also going to hear that panning sort of tremolo effect going from left to right this is a true stereo setup because we wouldn't get that effect in dual mono in dual mono we would just get the tremolo but it'd be the same in both sides so you can hear the left and right movement there of that tremolo pan I've also got a chorus effect set up just to show the additional width a stereo chorus can bring so think back to the dual mono chorus and how you had the same modulation signal both left and right here in the stereo mode you're going to hear a slight variation and finally one more bit of rewiring done I've now got the delay at the end with a stereo out so the only difference here is I'm actually coming stereo into this delay because this delay pedal needs to see a stereo in in order to give a stereo out not all delay pedals do this many delays will function with a mono in and a stereo out so everything I've done here to get that is I've just used the whirlwind selector switch here just to come A and B out and so I'm coming mono through mono through the drive through the modulation into the selector I've got both outputs of this going into both inputs of the delay and then we've got the left and right going to the respective amps so I've gone back now to that dual delay setting that I talked about earlier what you're going to hear is different delays in the left and right side it's going to send a shorter delay one side and a longer delay the other side just to demonstrate the difference between the delays I'm just going to hit a chord listen to the differences in the left and right speaker you can hear that left delay goes on for a lot longer than the right delay so here's how that sounds in context there we go now you guys know how to set up your rig in a bunch of different ways culminating with a full stereo image it's worth remembering when you're setting up a stereo rig that drive tones are always going to be dual mono so you're not going to get a drive that's going to move from speaker to speaker even if your drive pedal has two different outputs it's going to send the same thing to both sides the true stereo image comes from things like modulations delays or stereo reverbs anything that allows movement between the left and right sides so now that you've learned how to set your rig up in mono dual mono dual mono with a wet dry and full stereo try that out yourself and let us know down below in the comments which setup you guys prefer for your own tones thank you so much for watching hope you've enjoyed this video if you did let us know down below in the comments what you thought and how you run your own multi amp rigs we'd love to hear all about that as well don't forget to check out blackstar amplification on youtube for more videos just like this and if anyone out there is looking for a guitar teacher please head over to mgrmusic.com check out the music teacher database it's got a network of great teachers all around the country when to take you guys to that next level thanks so much for watching and i'll see you soon