Four-Cable Method Issues

[Grymm]

Hey everyone, I've got a bit of an issue with my Dualie.

I've got a mid-2000s Dual Rectifier, and god knows it delivers gain in spades when I want it. I don't always want it, though, and with my pickups (SD Blackouts) it's hard to get a working clean tone on the amp on its own. I can do it all day with my Pod HD500, though, so my first natural instinct was to go the four-cable route and use Pod preamps for cleans - which would save me a lot of time switching anyway.

I sort of feel like I've already figured out the issue myself, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something here. When I get everything up and running I leave the Mesa turned to red, since theoretically I should be bypassing the preamp with the Pod the way I have it set up and therefore wouldn't need to change channels. Except I do. With the POD running straight into the FX return and the Mesa on red I'm still getting a pretty decent amount of crunch coming through.

I've spent the last week running on about two hours of sleep 'cause the problem had me upset so much, but if I'm correct the issue is that Rectifiers with the parallel loops don't -actually- mix to 100 percent, right? My idea is to just have the series mod done so I can properly run this setup, but I've also read in a couple of instances that apparently some of the tone can STILL bleed through.

Can anyone tell me if I've got the problem right, and whether or not any preamp tone will come through to the other side of the loop if I do the series mod? Thanks for taking the time to read this.

 

[elvis]

You're going to want to bypass the Mesa input when in clean mode. There should be a way to not send guitar signal to the Mesa in that mode.

I would set the POD to turn the Mesa to clean channel when bypassed to keep the noise down.

You will definitely want a series loop. But even with a true series loop, there is always some signal bleed around the loop, so you will want to kill off the Mesa preamp as much as possible.

 

[Grymm]

I would set the POD to turn the Mesa to clean channel when bypassed to keep the noise down.

... How in the world do you do that? I thought the DIN connector for the Mesa footswitch wouldn't work with the Pod's MIDI.

Also, thanks for the reply!

 

[afu]

I would set the POD to turn the Mesa to clean channel when bypassed to keep the noise down.

... How in the world do you do that? I thought the DIN connector for the Mesa footswitch wouldn't work with the Pod's MIDI.

Also, thanks for the reply!

You'd push the switch. Short of having Voodoo custom make you a cable for their midi to DIN controller, you'll have to change the channel the old fashioned way.

The Send knob will distort a device when it's turned up. Having it in the vicinity of Noon will play nice most of the time. My best results were with the return turned all the way up and controlling the wet signal from the device. There very little comb filtering from the mixing between the signals; nearly none. Also, Ensure your device isn't slamming the return with a large enough signal to distort it. Go into your device's output control menu and adjust it for that patch.

As an aside, perhaps dropping your pickups a couple of screw turns will help. You can always turn the gain up if you need to compensate.

 

[domct203]

Set the amp to orange/vintage. IMO red/modern has way too much input sensitivity for what you are doing.

Dom

 

[elvis]

Amp Gizmo controlled by MIDI out from HD500