My practice / recording space is coming along nicely, one thing I've noticed is I tend to not use a few amps / cabinets just because my recording stuff is already set up in front of one amp. My friend suggested I build some kind of box that I could plug signal into that would and then use 2 switches to determine which amp and which cabinet would be used. Obviously it would depend no standard impedance for everything (would probably just go with 8 ohm stuff.)

Is this a thing that exists? Anyone have an idea of how to build it, or feel like taking on a (paid) project?

You mean something like....THIS?


Anyone that used to peruse Ampeg amps at Guitar Centers in the late 90s remembers them as a staple of the Ampeg display. But this simple answer is yes, this is very possible and can be quite simple. The real question is how dummy-proof you want to make it. You dont want to have a tube amp on without a load connected (speaker or dummy load). If you want to turn off any amp that is not currently selected, then that's okay. But if you want to make so that you dont have to turn off the amps that arent selected, then you need to have dummy loads that connect when you deselect the amp. Shouldnt be too terribly hard to do that though, and it allows for hot swapping of amps.

Are you doing this with tube amps? How many amp ins and cabinet outs are you looking for?

Yeah, that looks pretty perfect! Yes, tube amps (mostly anyway) and I'd probably be looking for 5-6 amps / heads and 2-3 cabinets. I don't need it to be fully dummy proof, I wouldn't want to leave anything on and I'm pretty careful about that kind of stuff.

sounds like you just need a patchbay.

Yeah a patchbay would likely do fine. If you dont need to connect dummy loads (i.e. you're gonna make sure to turn off amps that arent being used) then it's very easy. You just need two rotary switches. One to select which amp is active, and the other to select which cab.

Something you may want to consider in a patchbay or switching setup is to be mindful how long you make your cable runs since these will be unbalanced cables and might could lose some signal quality if you end up with a longer run. It's easy to have a lot of excess cabling coiled up behind your patchbay. If you have it all setup and playing in the same general proximity, you'll probably be fine? But if you are going from one room to the next like say plugging into the switch in the control room and then going out from there to your amp array...or just chaining together whatever series of cables you already have available...it's pretty easy to end up with a longer distance than expected. If average instrument cable is say 15-20 foot, two of those already puts you at 30-40 feet and you might notice the sound being affected. The longer you go, the more likely this is to happen.

There are a lot of solutions for this on the market but it's also added expense.

I'd be careful running speaker-level signals through an off-the-shelf patch bay. They're not usually meant to handle that sort of current.

Would a pedal switcher work? Seems like it would.

Again, those switches and jacks (and probably the internal wiring and relays) aren't really meant to handle high currents from the outputs of an amplifier.

You also have to be careful not to connect the outputs of two amplifiers together. That's a recipe for destroying one or both amps.

The Ampeg box did it right. Big break-before-make rotary switches, dummy loading on the unselected channels.

We designed a custom box for this at work, to switch between different amplifiers for blind A/B/X listening comparisons, and it was quite a task. But then again, we wanted it software controlled. The first iteration used large relays with gold contacts and a National Instruments USB DAQ box to switch between sources. We also had to program some dead-time to avoid cross-conduction during the debounce period of the relays.

We found that the noise from the relays was too distracting, and the relatively long debounce time (100 ms or so) left an audible gap. So we replaced the relays with power MOSFETs. Dead times are much lower. It's almost seamless now.