Problem making a patch with 2 amps.

[moonman079]

I’m sure this has been discussed a lot before. But I have been having problems with my eyes lately and don’t want to strain them by looking through a ton of threads. 
after stepping away from playing for a few months due to health issues and a few deaths in the family. I am finally starting to explore more of what my helix LT can do.

I’ve been trying to make a patch with 2 amps. But it sounds very thin and mostly feedback. 
I’m running a single headrush frfr with a 12” speaker. I can get plenty of sounds I like when running a single amp. But as soon as I add another it sounds awful. 
I’ve watched a few videos but still can’t get it right. 
I am running amp 1 in path 1A then running that into amp 2 in path 2A. Without any effects blocks on either. What am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

[SaschaFranck]

You don't want one amp to run into another. What you need to do is to cable things up parallely.

[rvroberts]

If you describe what you are doing correctly, you are actually running one amp into the other?

In the real world when you want 2 amps, you run them independently - that is one into its own speakers and the other into its own speakers.

You can't actually run one amp directly into the other without blowing them up! 

So typically in Helix land, you need parallel paths.

DSP can get in the way here - so often (depending on how complex your effects chain is and the particular amps) you need to put one amp on each path and send both to output individually.

It is not normally the case that you would feed the output of one amp into the input of another.  

Dual amps are not normally connected to each other - even if Helix makes it possible. Dual amp rigs might have a batch of effects before the split to the 2 amps - but from there on you keep them seperate. Some people have used a preamp as a kind of valve overdrive in front of another amp - but not one amp into another.

You can feed the result into your FRFR - no problem!  You would do that to say mix 2 different amp overdrives.  I've done it where one amp is reasonably clean and the other heavily driven. You don't need 2 FRFRs, although if you really want to experience a double amp rig, it would be necessary to have 2 FRFR boxes.

Hope that make sense to you?

 

[rd2rk]

Attached are samples of two ways to do it.

In "Combined Parallel" both amps are ON at once. You're after the combined sound. You can pan them L/R.

Note that the amps I chose are high DSP, so there's not much you can add without extending the signal chain to Path 2.

In "Channel Switch" You're mimicking a dual channel amp. One amp at a time is ON, and you switch "channels" with the assigned footswitch.

You can use two different sounding amps as in "Combined Parallel" with the "Channel Switch" configuration to create your own custom dual channel amp.

You can also create a 3 channel amp the same way by using Snapshots for the channel switching. The third amp will usually need to be in Path 2 for DSP reasons.

Channel Switch.hlx Combined Paralle.hlx