Hey guys!

Has anyone come up with (or can think of) a mod for the Spider Valve that could override the internal control that internally disconnects the Preamp Out feed to the tube amp when you plug into the Poweramp In jack?

See I’m kind of a routing freak! In my rig I have several effects chains (which include Pod X3 Live for both effects and preamp sims) and several amps that I combined them with. For that I have several custom made routing switches that work pretty great allowing me to choose in every amp in which input jack I want to put the signal.

The Spider Valve is one of my favorite amps so I wanna hook it up to my rig in a way that I can choose if I want the guitar signal to go into the Input jack (front), the Poweramp jack (back) or through both and the Preamp Out jack (for use with 4 cables method) depending on the chain I want to use.

But this represents a problem because I need cables hooked to all inputs at the same time all the time. When I do this to the Spider Valve, the Poweramp jack pretty much disconnects the Input jack (because what it does is send the signal out through the Preamp Out) no matter if there’s no signal coming into the Poweramp jack. Just by the fact that something is connected there, it does the disconnection.

Just to illustrate this imagine the following:

Guitar goes into an effects chain (made of fully true bypass stomps) and a Whammy and a Compressor are activated. Then it goes into the Input jack of the Spider Valve (passing through Strymon’s SVPre) where I use the Amber Blues model. But then for another part of the song I wanna change to a different effects chain that has the Pod X3 Live in it. I click a toggle in my routing switch and go into the Pod where I select a patch the has a RMC Real McCoy Wah in front of an Orange AD30TC amp which then I need to send into the Poweramp sections of the Spider Valve so that it passes through the tubes and gets amplified (this time I can’t go into the Input jack because I’ll be stacking to preamps… the one in the Spider Valve and the one selected in the Pod X3 Live).

See what I’m doing? I like the freedom to select where I want my signal whether that’s in different amps or in specific jacks within the same amp. But I can’t to this with the Spider Valve because when something is plugged into the Poweramp jack it overrides the Input jack. For all I know a dummy 1/4 cable could be connected there with no signal at all and it will still override the Input jack.

This is a shame because I’m really in love with the options that the Spider Valve can offer me and I wanna included in this scheme I use. So the only thing I can think of is taking my SV to some tech so that he can moded for me in some way that will allow me to do this, but first I wanted to check with you guys here at the forum and see if I could get some good ideas!

As always, your thoughts will be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!