Hey Richard,
man you always mention that mixer idea, I like that man I do, but I still need something I can setup quite quickly, and if I'm honest I struggle to get my current rig set up on time. Also adding more gear to the rig adds more potential for something to go wrong. So right now I'm using a preamp in 4cm and going stereo and that can be a challenge to setup myself during change overs of bands on the night, especially when a band aren't getting off the stage in a hurry or some prick keeps stepping on your leads or in your way whilst rushing to get all your cables run. So despite that awesome solution (and benefit of running fx in parallel and mixing myself in) it's not viable for me.
I'm already trying to move away from my 4cm utilizing a floor based FX unit purely to get rid of the long cable runs MJMP always warned me about. On Saturday I played my rig like this:
Guitar > noisegate > Preamp > noisegate > FX Pedal return > FX Pedal Out > Power amp
now usually I do this
Guitar > FX Pedal In > FX Send > Noise Gate > Preamp > Noise Gate > FX Pedal Return > FX Pedal Out > Power amp
The difference was incredible. A lot more texture depth to my tone doing that. However I sacrificed the use of the Harmonizer on the pedal by running that way, because the pitch/harmony FX block must utilize the FX unit's input signal to read the pitch, so by me bypassing this I render that functionality useless as well as on board tuner.
So I don't really need to avoid the FX unit input, that wasn't what I was trying to do essentially, but I do want to get rid of that extra long cable run I have within the loop so a quick way to see what that would sound like was to forget the GT5 input and literally go into the preamp in a more direct fashion and go back into the pedal via the FX return. And I can't exactly have my rack preamp in the floor just to have it close the fx unit to avoid a long cable run.
So I guess this is why I want to get to the point where I have the FX unit in the rack, making all connections short between interchanging devices, that way avoiding a lot of tone suck that I've probably had for a while and not even realised.
Another solution would be to get my FX unit (which is floor based right now) closer to the preamp in the rack, but then I'd have to go right up to the front of the speakers to change patches and turn on/OFF fx etc unless I could control that unit via midi. But then why do that as essentially I'd be adding another floor unit to have to worry about it.
So they forward is getting the FX unit into the rack to avoid the cable. That unit may be the GX700 I own until I get familiar enough with the GSP.
As or flight rig, viable preamps in a pedal. Man my first choice was MP1 channel, but the prices are way out of my league so it aint gonna be an MP1 unless someone buy's me one. The APP1 aint cheap either.
Something by AMT is looking like a more viable pedal preamp option. I considered this but I cannot switch off the dam speaker sim! If this could be modded out then I'd have a very marshally analogue SS solution.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Marshall-DRP-1-Direct-Recording-Pre-amp-Guitar-Pedal/263634113793?hash=item3d61d15501:g:4HsAAOSwC11ZyRZP