What do I need to achieve a wet/dry set up?

[mentoneman]

i would just run two heads and go W/W stereo. I tried W/D for a while thinking I needed to keep one amp dry, then tried running R/L stereo with both amps wet and was blown away at how much better the effects sound that are really designed for stereo in the first place. When you want dry, just create a patch with your midi switcher to make both amps go dry or "D/D" so to speak, for your core crunch rhythm sound.

my experience with stereo, w/d, and wdw has been:

stereo is great for a rig where you are using IEMs and the stereo FOH sounds nice, the soundman is your friend, and your band sound is designed around it, but can be tricky to set up the perfect monitoring position if you use your cabs to monitor with or even worse use a pair of stage monitors to reproduce your stereo mix through

w/d translates best over both mono and stereo FOH systems and you are less likely to get lost in a stage mix versus stereo rigs. i defaulted to this config as best bang for buck after years of trying it all.

wdw is the best sound overall for both stage and house but is the biggest hassle to transport/set up and mic. with 3 speaker/amp sources it is an acoustically louder starting point for your stage mix so if lower volume is critical you might be fighting bandmates and soundmen to arrive at your sweet spot.

my last live rig was all direct "pseudo" wdw to FOH, with IEM racked up using a rocktron rack interface/juice extractor to knock my amp to load, add cab emulation into the mixer center(dual mono) dry, and parallel feed my pcm80, gforce, and korg dl8000 delay from the juice extractor's remaining line outputs to 3 parallel stereo outputs from the fx into the mixer.

the rack interface then received a stereo monitor mix from our IEM system into a dedicated "monitor in" on the interface, which i could then blend with my direct/cab emulated rack tone, and feed headphones out of my interface to my earbuds, while sending a balanced stereo pair of XLR outputs to FOH cab emulated, minus the stage IEM mix.

after countless rigs and experiments, i had the best and most pleasing and consistent personal live tone monitoring rig i'd ever put together.