Two heads into one cab?

[ttiwguitar]

Hey guys, I've been reading this board a lot and thought you might be able to know a bit more about this than I do. My band is in the process of recording right now, and for our guitar tone we used a combination of Dual Rec and 5150, which sounds amazing. We ran the Rec through one of our own Mesa Traditional 4x12 cabs and the 5150 through an oversized one. We like the tone so much that we want to buy a pair of 5150s to run along with our Rectifiers live to get a similiar sound.. but can this be done with just one cab? I'm guessing since our cabs are 16 ohms each we can set the heads to 8ohms each and run them into the 8 ohm stereo inputs in the back of our cabs, but would this work/sound good at all?

 

[Aaron Smith]

I don't think that there would be any physical or tonal problems with running two amps into a stereo cab. Each amp of course would only use two speakers though, which is where the problems might start, and by problems I mean this: to capture both amps live, the soundguy will have two put two mics onto the cab, he will have to soundcheck both mics, and have twice as many guitar tracks to worry about when mixing your set...and who knows if he will even want to bother with that many mics. If you have a soundguy that will be willing to bring out more mics, cables, and stands in the middle of a show, then maybe things will be okay. I know that two mics on one source is not really an extremely difficult thing, because it's done on bigger tours and such all the time, but if your band would be considered "smaller" than such, then the soundguy will likely be less willing to put so much care into making things work. I'm probably making sound guys sound like jerks, and of course not all of them are, but the more things there are that could make the show be delayed, the more unhappy the soundguy (and the entire venue) will be. ...that said, if you don't think you're concerned about that, as I've said- I don't think there would be any problem using one cab with two amps.

 

[ThatGuitarGuy]

why not use one mesa and one 5150...why do both guitarist need BOTH at the same time?

You're not always going to get a gig that will have a soundboard that is all that great and can fit everything you want on it. That and honestly...a lot of people wont notice it live. Save all the goodies for a recording.

Thats just my advice though, you don't have to take it.

 

[Sinister Mephisto]

Taking both the previous posts into acount, here's my opinion,:

I think that would be really cool. I wanted to try something pretty similer although I wasn't sure if switching channels could be simplified at all... anyway, even if the audience won't notice, it's always important that you sound good to yourself. I play about 10 times better when I'm liking my amp sound, so you should do it for that reason anyway.


Also, if you can only use one mike then have one with a mic on the 5150 side, and one with a mic on the rectifier side. If you have two mics, for each cabinet, great.

Basically, I don't think you can go wrong. If you DO have two mics, it will sound great, if you have one mic per cabinet you can do what GuitarGuy suggested, and whatever you end up doing, as long as you're near your amp, it'll sound great to you. Wish I could do that same and tell us how it works out if you do it!

 

[ttiwguitar]

Thanks for the replies. I kinda figured it would require two mics on the amp. We might just go with one of us using a 5150 and the other using the Rec. Thanks again!