Wet/dry/wet rigs explained: history, how it works, and how to build one

You've heard me banging on about this for years, so let's get into it. What exactly is a wet/dry rig?

At its heart it's simple: your core sound — guitar, gain tones, amp — stays completely dry, while your delays and reverbs run alongside it, sent to a separate amp instead of standing in line between you and your speaker. The effects sit around your sound, not on top of it.

That's a wet/dry rig — and once you've heard one, an ordinary signal chain never quite sounds the same again.

What's wrong with running everything in one chain?

Nothing — right up until you run out of headroom.

In a normal chain, your delay and reverb sit in line with everything else, and one amp has to reproduce all of it: the attack of the note and the repeats and the reverb tail, all fighting for space in the same speaker. The more effect you mix in, the more of your core sound you give away. Push the amp and the headroom goes away, compressing the wet effects. Push the mix high enough to sound lush and your attack goes soft and washy. Back it off to keep the punch and the effects all but disappear.

The studio never had this problem — and that's where this story starts.

Where wet/dry came from

Listen to any classic record and most of the time the delays and reverbs aren't in line with the guitar — they're on their own channels of the desk, mixed in parallel alongside a dry guitar that never passed through a single effect. The engineer sends the mic'd amp to the effects, brings the wet back on separate faders, and balances the two. Dry stays dry. Wet floats around it. That's why guitars on records sound huge and clear at the same time.

The problem was doing that live. In the early 1980s, in the LA session world, Bob Bradshaw and Michael Landau went after exactly this: the effects sounded glorious on the record but never quite landed the same way live, because on stage everything was running in series into the front of one amp. Their answer was to stop treating the amp as the end of the chain. Use the amp you love for your core sound, tap the signal off it, run that tap through the rack effects, and mix the wet returns in parallel through a line mixer feeding a stereo pair of power amps and cabs either side of the stage. The dry amp never touched an effect. The wet system never touched the dry sound.

That architecture became the sound of the 80s — the refrigerator racks behind Landau, Lukather, and eventually Eddie Van Halen were all versions of this idea. The gear dated; the idea didn't. It's never been improved on, because it's how mixing works.

What a true wet/dry/wet system actually is

People use "wet/dry" loosely (including me) for any two-amp setup, so it's worth being precise about what the traditional meaning/signal path is:

• Your centre amp makes your sound — guitar, drives, the amp itself. Completely dry.
• The signal is tapped off the centre amp's preamp — into a mixer.
• The mixer sends that signal to the wet effects and brings them back into the mixer, where they're all combined in parallel — wet signal only, no dry.
• Two outputs of the mixer feed an outside pair of amps — left and right of the dry amp — and sometimes even a small PA on stage.

Two things make it "true". First, the dry signal path never passes through a single effect — not even a bypassed one. Second, the wet effects are mixed alongside the dry sound rather than inserted into it, exactly like the faders on a studio desk. Dry punch in the middle, effects in stereo around it. It's the closest a live rig gets to sounding like a record — because it is how records are made.

The mixer, in a box: the Wet/Dry Machine

For forty years, building the true version meant a rack, a load box, a line mixer and a van. So we built the whole output side into one half-rack box: the Wet/Dry Machine. Your signal comes in, a stereo effects loop sends to your wet effects and brings them back, and up to four fully configurable outputs send everything exactly where it needs to go — cleanly, in phase, and under complete control. Level control per amp, phase correction on board, transformer-less isolation so there's no tone loss, and balanced XLR outputs for when your "wet pair" is front of house or an amp sim rather than two more amps.

Here it is doing all of this in five minutes — including getting Joey Landreth's rig set up and playing.

How we do it in the G3

Prefer the whole thing living inside your switcher? The G3 and G3S build that architecture in, and it's all preset-based — one preset is a straight mono chain, the next is full wet/dry/wet, on one press.

The engine is the Parallel feature (section 4.11 of the G3 manual, if you want the full walkthrough): you pick a point in your signal path to split, choose whether the paths re-join or run to separate outputs, and assign loops to the parallel path. And because parallel paths can cancel frequencies if they're out of phase, there's a programmable phase button on the top panel — if a parallel sound ever goes thin, flip it.

Wet/dry is one setup away: split after your gain tones, no re-join. Your gain tones go to both amplifiers, and your delays and reverbs go to only one of them — and it sounds massive. Is this true wet/dry in the vintage style? No, because we're not using a parallel mixer, but nowadays the pedals and the dry signal in the pedals is so good that it works great. You can have a delay and reverb in series and still sound absolutely massive.

True wet/dry/wet uses Parallel X 4, which gives you up to four stereo parallel paths plus a dry path. A HumDinger in the loop before the split taps off your dry signal and feeds the centre amp — the centre-dry option. After the split, the signal hits your stereo delay and reverb pairs, and their outputs go to the G3's two output mixers: wet only, mixed in parallel, sent stereo left and right to the outside amps. That's the Bradshaw architecture — the tap, the mixer, the wet-only sides — on a pedalboard.

Isolation on the outputs keeps a multi-amp rig quiet (ground loops are the traditional tax on wet/dry rigs), and it all plays properly with spillover — change presets and your stereo trails keep ringing across the new sound.

Do you really need three amps?

No — and this is the bit that surprises people. Two amps gets you wet/dry, and that's already most of the magic. No second amp at all? Send the wet side to a powered speaker, a modeler, or straight to front of house, and keep your amp dry. The principle is the split and the parallel mix, not the amp count. Start with what you own.

I've set this up more times than I can count, and it still makes me grin every single time the wet amps come in. Here's the whole thing, working, so you can hear what all these words are trying to describe.

FAQ

What's the difference between wet/dry and wet/dry/wet?

The difference is that with wet/dry/wet you have stereo wet effects, and therefore you need a stereo image. With a standard wet/dry, all the wet effects go to one amp — sometimes including the dry — but the dry only goes to one amp as well. With wet/dry/wet you need a stereo image of wet effects; with a standard wet/dry, you don't.

The conundrum is that a wet/dry rig often can sound stereo, especially if you're looking at modulation effects in one amp and not the other. It's a really magic way to do it.

Who invented the wet/dry/wet rig?

It grew out of the studio, where effects were always mixed in parallel on the desk. Bob Bradshaw and Michael Landau are generally credited with bringing that architecture to the stage in early-80s LA — tapping the amp, running the effects in a rack, and mixing wet-only to a stereo pair of power amps. The refrigerator racks of the 80s were built on it.

Does the wet side have to be 100% wet?

It can carry dry too — and that's the version I personally use the most. We call it TPS Wet-Dry because it's something we use on That Pedal Show a lot, where we split after the gain stage. One side goes direct to the dry amp. The other side feeds our wet effects and goes through to the wet amp. Of course, if you kill the dry in the wet signal and mix everything in parallel — that's what makes it "true" Wet/Dry.

Why does my multi-amp rig hum?

Almost always a ground loop — two amps connected to each other through your signal path and the mains. It's why the G3S has our true Hi-Def isolated output: it breaks the loop without breaking the signal, with zero transformer colouration.

Can I build a wet/dry/wet rig with the pedals I already own?

Yes — that's the point. Your existing delays and reverbs do the wet work: the G3 or G3S handles the splitting, mixing and switching on the board, or the Wet/Dry Machine does the output side as a dedicated box. Map it out first in the Signal Path Designer.

Do I need a G3 or the Wet/Dry Machine?

They solve different halves of the problem. The G3 and G3S are switching systems with the parallel wet/dry routing built in — your whole pedalboard, presets and all. The Wet/Dry Machine is a dedicated output controller: the tap, the stereo effects loop and the amp outputs in one half-rack box, for when running multiple amps is the problem you're solving. And yes, they work beautifully together.

Is wet/dry/wet overkill for small gigs?

I've been using wet/dry on small stages for 20 years, and personally I do not feel it's overkill at all. Of course, you can get a great guitar sound with any one amplifier, but there's something about a wet/dry sound that just fills the stage in a different way. It actually means I can sound bigger and be quieter. If you want to do a true stereo wet/dry, of course that can sound massive, but you need to rely on the stereo image of the two wet amplifiers. And with presets it's not a commitment — the same board does both.

See our complete wet/dry range in one place: Wet Dry Solutions.

Daniel Steinhardt is the founder of The GigRig and co-founder of That Pedal Show.