What is a Wet-Dry-Wet Rig?

Quite simply, a wet-dry-wet rig is when you use three speaker cabinets in a stereo plus center configuration for Left Side Effects Only, Center No Effects, Right Side Effects Only setup.

I got a lot of interesting feedback when I posted this photo of my guitar rig awhile back. It looks a little crazy, but it all makes perfect sense in an over the top, Spinal Tap, kind of way.

Here’s the basic run down of what it includes, how the signal routes and how it works…

Tone

I love the double tracked guitar sound. You can’t quite easily do that yourself with two guitars, but you can do something somewhat similar by blending the sound of two amps. I chose to keep it Mesa Boogie because I am a little OCD, but it’s also because the smooth Mark thick sound blends amazingly well with the course grit of a Rectifier. My main tone comes from a Mesa Boogie Mark V through a Mesa Boogie Rectifier 4×12 straight cabinet. My effected tone comes from a Mesa Boogie Rectifier Recording Preamp.

Power

The Mesa Boogie Mark V has it’s own power section, but the Rectifier Recording Preamp obviously does not. I chose the Rectifier Recording Preamp instead of a Dual or Triple Rectifier because I wanted my effects to be in stereo and didn’t want to effectively buy two amps. By using the Rectifier Recording Preamp into a Mesa Boogie SimulClass Stereo 2:Fifty, I get the great tones from a Rectifier into two cabinets with warm tube power.

Effects

Any nerdy progressive rock guitarist is only mortal without effects. The photo above actually is a very slim version of what I am using at any given time. I had just set this rig up and was testing without any of my usual pedals. I have around 40 stomp box pedals that rotate in and out so traditionally you will find my huge orange pedal board in front of this rig, but since it’s not pictured we’ll just skip that for now and talk about the wet side of the rig. I chose to use a T.C. Electronic G-Major 2. The way the rig is designed, the 4×12 never has modulation or delay type effects, those are reserved for the two 2×12 cabinets.

Control

A rig like this can be a monster to control so you have to find a way to manage it all. I chose the Voodoo GCX and Ground Control. It’s a nightmare to cable up, but the way it’s wired right now I have some interesting options. The first thing I do is use the buffered outputs to split my guitar signal in two. One copy of the signal goes into the Mark V, the other into the Rectifier Recording Preamp. I am using the first loop to determine the preamp path for the wet side of the rig. I can select to either send the slave output of the Mark V into the G-Major two, or I can choose to send the Rectifier Recording Pre into the G-Major two.

The next several set of loops control channel and option switching on the two Mesa Amps. I also pass the MIDI from the GCX to the G-Major 2. When that’s all put together in a patch, I can click one preset button and it will select one or more amps, the appropriate channel, a preset from the G-Major 2 and any solo, FX loop, etc. settings on the amps. I can manually set all of the options on the rig, then store the GCX setting and G-Major 2 setting to a preset and then I can recall it with a single foot tap.

Other

I of course use a rack mount power strip to provide all of the juice and have a Korg rack mount tuner that’s running from the tuner out of my volume pedal. My pedal board, not pictured, is powered by a Voodoo Pedal Power 2. One last bit of detail about the rig: everything is connected via balanced cables where balanced connections can be made. All rack units are are bolted in using a plastic shoulder washer on each side to decouple them from the rack rails. Each rack unit is touching the rack units above, but conductively separated by a small strip of electrical tape on the top and bottom of every other unit. When building the rig, the Rectifier Recording Preamp and Mesa Power amp have ground lifts, so as I added each unit I checked for ground loops and set the devices appropriately.

Summary

That’s the basics. It’s actually very easy to operate once it’s all configured and the kinks were ironed out. It’s one of those set ups that can pretty much dial up any type of sound I could ever need. It also looks pretty bad ass! :)