So if you're just happy just dropping a Stratton or combo with an overdrive pedal, then this section probably won't be of immediate interest to you. However, as I've learned that longer I play guitar, the bigger your setup becomes, and it's kind of fun starting to put imaginative rigs together in large tours, you'll typically see these larger rigs and their purpose is to give you pretty much the most flexibility you have in terms of switching out other guitars or effects or apps. on the fly. Let's look at the major categories of rigs. The first one will be fairly basic net is that the effects loops that you will find in the back of most guitar heads or some combos have this as well. Then a little bit more complicated one is the four wire rig.

We'll look at that in a moment. Then we have our guitar amps effects, switching boxes. Some sort of box in between your guitars and amps allow you to switch out to the amps and your various effects pedals. And then we have our wet dry rigs. Let's start off with the effects loops. So here's what it looks like.

There's basically a series version and a parallel version. So in the series version, we have an AMP hit. But instead of viewing this, as you know, one head, let's kind of break it in half where we have a preamp and a power amp. And what we can do is send a signal from a preamp to the sin and then comes back into power amp so it goes out to the Send, and then returns back to the parent. So then what we can do is we can take the Send, take it through a bunch of external pedals and then return that back into their turn which ends up going back into the power amp. So in a parallel setup, it's virtually identical except with the addition of a straight line It goes from the preamp to the parents, there's two paths, one straight through to the parent, the other one that goes through that loop.

And typically, they'll be a volume knob, or send amount on that effects loop. So you can have varying amounts of whatever is in that effects loop. Now in terms of effect or design, there's a few different ways we can do this typically a guitar that'll just go straight through the app, it would a daisy chain, a bunch of effects that would go in maybe from the right here we have maybe three different gain effects and followed by a couple of modulation pedals and then followed by some time based pedals. The guitar goes into the input of the first pedal and then it goes output input output input daisy chain all the way through and that'll work fine that has worked well with everybody for years and years and years. But let me just throw a curveball in here. Imagine a metal core just burn up somehow just failed.

Me the battery went flat all the power supply was battled all the pedals. All went bad Guess what, that nobody takes that out that is destroyed everything downstream from that. And then you know, your guitar will not make it all the way through to your app, there is a different way of going about this. And that is using a true bypass. Now I've got this true bypass looper from clearly designs. And here's what it looks like.

We have a guitar, which goes into the input and ink straight through to the output. So everything works fine the way it is right now, guitar to app. But if you were to activate that, then that would break that chain, and then take it through in a loop through all your federal effect pedals, and then back through and then out to your app. If I was to activate that again, then that would break. basically take that loop all the way out and then directly connect you to your app. Now why is this really useful?

We'll imagine this instead of placing everything in here is one big long And we could start thinking of them in groups gain modulation and time groups that kind of like subgroups of pedals. And in this scenario, maybe we could have three of these true bypass loot boxes. And the first one, in other words, the one on the right, that's going out and through your gain subgroup, and returning there. Now, instead of having all these red squiggly lines all over the page, it's going to start to get a little bit busier. Let's change that out. And then let's change it with a more basic color design.

So this diagram here is showing that the gain subgroup is going through the loop of the first bypass pill, and the modulation is going through the second one, and time is going through the third one right here. Then when we place a guitar in, then the guitar would go in, it would go through the gains, and then out of that looper into the second looper through all the modulations and then Out of that second loop into the third one through all of that, and then finally out to your amplifier. Now, why would you do it this way? Well imagine in our example before where the metals don't just burn up, remember that we had the metal zone failing, well, guess what, we could bypass that subgroup, and they would all go away and a guitar would be directly connected and go through to a second set and modulation and time.

So even though anything on our gain subgroup, if any of that fell, we can just bypass it completely. So there's a couple of reasons this is good. Obviously, the failsafe option is really good, but also even if you bypass some pedals, they still kind of add some color to your sound. This way, you can bypass them out of the loop. And also you can have very quick one click access to just activate and deactivate subgroups. So you could bring your modulation in and out with just one unclick of the second loop in this example, let's look at a little bit more of an advanced setup called a four wire rig.

And it starts off with an AMP head that has a send return an effects loop. And then we have a multi effects processor. And Agata, let me actually zoom in on the multi effect processor so we can see its inputs and outputs. So in the most standard setup, you would just plug your guitar straight into the app, if you wanted to include the model effects, you'd plug into the model effects, and then in turn the output of that into the app. But let's look at the four wire rig and why this is so special. So we'll take the output of Agha top, place it in the input of the multi effects processor right there in the input.

And then we take the Send of the multiplex process and place that through to the input of the app. So everything is basically the same except we're using a send out of the model effects rather than just its output. Then we take the Send of the app and bring that into the return of the multi effects processor. And then we take the output of modern epic processor and place it back into the return of the effects loop of the app. So here are the full Whys, the first one goes straight into the motor effects processor, then the Send of the multi effects process that goes into the input of the app, the Send of the effects loop gets returned into the effects processor, and then the output goes into the return of the effects loop of the app. Now this y might be a little complicated to see, let's see it in a diagram that will make much more sense.

So we have a multi effects processor. Let's break that in half. And then we have a guitar which goes into the input of the multi effects processor. Now on most modern effects processors, you have a sin and return right? How about we placed the front end of your app in that effects loop of your multi effects and the reason we Do this is a lot of multi effects units are just excel at all the stompbox kind of effects. They're really, really good at that.

But quite often you just can't. Even though the AMP modeling is really good, maybe you just love the sound of the front end of your app does crunching. And this way, you're basically placing it in the in the middle of your multi effects, you're in effects loop. And the output of the multi effects goes out to the back end of your app, which just basically boost everything up ready to go out to your speaker. So you kind of see that the front end of your app is placed in the effects loop of the multi effects. And that goes on to the back end of your app.

You know, either way you see it, this is how the actual wiring looks like. Either you can you can just follow the instructions on the lower diagram there. Or if you just want to kind of visualize that a little bit better. Perhaps the one up top kind of helps you kind of visualize exactly what's going on internally of guitar amp and effects switching, you will have some sort of box that is in between your guitar and your amps and your effect boxes. So these kind of boxes will allow you to take the inputs of all your guitars and then switch them out out into amp number one or number two or number three or any combination of those and then also allow you to switch in and out various effects as well. I'm just showing here as a black box because there are a lot of different boxes that will do that kind of work.

In terms of guitar amp and effects switching, there are many many out there that change pretty quickly. So it's quite tough to show what today's model looks like because they switch out all the time and many of them are buttering players. And super expensive though there are no there are a few options out there. If you want to switch across amps, then just get an AB switcher that switches you from one app to that Some of them are called AB y boxes in which you can switch between the A app the B app, and then the Y option sends you to both of those apps. Now there are two tasks which is to that allow you to have several guitars going into your Guitar Rig. It's very easy to just kind of mute the input to your signal chain, you know, maybe the volume pedals and that swap your guitars out, then bring the volume back up to avoid you know, the loud clicks and buzzes you get from just know unplugging.

Live unplugging and playing live guitars. But there may be times when you want to have maybe a 12 string on a stand or some other specialty guitar like a nylon string on a stand that you can just walk over to play with on a stand keep your normal guitar on and then just reach out and play for a few guitars a guitar which would be great setup for this situation. However, you'll probably want to switch your amps to reclaim acoustic type as you change guitars. So, you know, there are several manufacturers that allow you to switch guitars and amps at the same time, even through MIDI, but a lot of them tend to be kind of small boutique shops because the market for that kind of thing, frankly, is, is pretty small, right. The other type of switching is to switch in and out your individual stompboxes and place them in different orders and memorize them.

Actually boss has a couple in probably a few other manufacturers have a couple of these types of switches used to be back in the day only boutique shops like probably Bradshaw systems and a few others made these custom setups that were thousands and thousands of dollars. It's far more compact and cost effective. Right now that's for sure. In a wet dry breaks that up, you have a couple of apps, we have a dry side and a wet side, the dry sides very easy. Just plug your guitar straight in there, that's dry, there's nothing going through there except just the dry guitar sound. But then if we use the sand from that effects loop met dries out.

And then we send that out to all of our specs that goes through all of those daisy chain and comes out the other side. And that's returned into the return of the wet app. Now then you have three different amps, you obviously need to mic both of them up separately. And then you've kind of house person will then have two channels, and they'll be a blend between your dry and your website. Now this isn't the case of we're just doing this model. If you were to do this in stereo, we could do a wet dry wet rigs, and here's what that would look like.

We start out with our guitar plug straight into the dry and then the Send of that dry goes out to all our effects and the output of all these effects is stereotyped. Then we would send out the output of that into the return of the left wet. And then the other side that the right side that would go into the return of the right wet. In that case, we'd have three different microphones that we would need to send out to the front of house dry would typically be pan down the middle, and the left hard left and the right hard, right. The variety of manufacturers who make this higher end advance rig equipment seems always to change. Frank, the market is fairly small, considering how many people go down this path.

I mean, can be considered the ratio of weaking guitars to professional touring guitars, it's, it's really tough for the major manufacturers to get into this market. So the result is that it's normally the fray of smaller boutique manufacturers that go frankly kind of in and out of business. There should be a list of some of them on our website for you to go and check out So, that is the advanced rig design portion of the training. Let's put everything we've learned together and chase down the iconic tones that we've heard throughout rock history.