Headrush FX | What does doubling up your amp or speakers do? : HeadRush

The classic arena rock image for any guitar player is a wall of amplifiers from one guitar blasting out to an audience. Musicians have been doubling up amps live and in the studio all the way back to Chuck Berry with two Fender Reverb amps and beyond. The use of them is to thicken up tone, allow for stereo effects across two amps/speakers and to have a backup during your gig and many more uses.

Your Headrush signal chain can do this too with any amp block, IR block or speaker cabinet block by tapping it to highlight it, then pressing the 2x button on screen.

While you wouldn't need to have a backup amp built into a digital board, there is a lot of tonal variety that can be achieved through doubling up amps within the board. Once you've doubled up the block, either side can be selected and have the amplifier/speaker/ir changed within the block. Whatever is on the top side of the pair up will go to the left while the bottom side will go to the right within your outputs. This is an important piece if you are looking to achieve a stereo split and wish to have a clean side going to an amp on stage- if all of the distortion or drive in the signal is coming from an amp, splitting the amp and changing one side of the split to a clean will allow you to run the amplified, gain from one side and a clean signal to the other. Anything after that will keep it's panned justification and apply the effects to both sides of this split equally.

In addition, this allows for greater tonal variety as both amps can be dialed in with different equalizations during recording, then having the two sides recorded at the same time without having bleed between the amps like you would in an analog situation.

For speaker cabinet blocks, this also allows you greater tonal capabilities as you select to offset the mic, select 2 different mics and blend them, select 2 different speaker cabinets, or even select 2 different volumes within the cabinet to allow you to create a lighter stereo pan for a live sound and apply effects to this afterwards to keep it's panned position.

One more advanced technique is known as Amp Blending. Amp Blending is to have two different amps and blend the sound between them using an expression pedal to see-saw the volume between them and create different tones as one amp or the other takes more precedence within your sound.

To do this, start with a double amp block using the 2x function, replace one of the amps in the stack and set the amps the way you would want their tones.

From there, change the Rig Width to 0% in your OUT block.

Then go into the hardware assign. From there you would set the expression pedal to advanced mode, then assign both volumes to the expression pedal by filling two of the + arrow slots on the right hand side.