Building a Fly Rig with AMPED 1
If you’re a gigging musician you will know all about how much it costs to tour and transport gear. In the golden days of rock bands would often be seen with walls of speaker cabinets behind them, but unfortunately for many working musicians, this is no longer a reality.
These days, musicians have to be savvy. This means scaling back to essentials to cut down on transport costs, and sometimes this can even mean using locally sourced backline at various venues.
To combat this, you can build yourself a versatile, and compact touring rig that you can fit into your suitcase.
In this video I am using the AMPED 1 as my amp. With a setup like this, you could show up at any venue, rent or borrow a cabinet on stage (of use the Cab Rig to feed the Front of House), plug in and play!
Amplifier and Reverb
In this rig, the AMPED 1 is both the amplifier and the reverb. The amp is set with the EQ fairly flat with a slight mid scoop and a slight top boost. When EQing an amp always start with everything at midnight and make little adjustments to find the tone you want.
This is also set with a USA voice and a 6L6 response to get a high headroom clean tone, perfect for stacking pedals with.
Modulation
When building a versatile rig, it’s always useful to have some sort of textural sound available, this could be a modulation or a delay. A chorus pedal is always a useful addition to add some swirl to clean tones.
Drive
Dual overdrives are great tools for fly rig setups because you can get 2 different sounds from one pedal. This LT Dual is set up with one side for rhythm playing and the other for lead playing.
Power
The AMPED 1 has 2 9v DC outputs on the rear that you can use to hook up pedals. You can use a daisy chain cable to add some extra connectivity if you need more pedals, but keep in mind the total draw from the AMPED 1 is 500mA. The pedals you add cannot exceed this.
CabRig or Speaker Cabinet
When plugging your rig in, you can use the AMPED 1 to power a real cabinet on stage, or you can run out of the XLR output for CabRig and feed a cabinet emulation to the PA system. You can also combine the two together to have some additional tonal options.
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About the Author
This article on how to build a fly rig with AMPED 1 was written by Leigh Fuge. Leigh is a professional guitarist and content creator and also works alongside musicteacher.com to create guitar focused, educational and entertainment content.
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