V-Twin Pre-Amp Pedal
I bought this in 2011 because I had to sell my Boogie amp to raise some money, but I still wanted to have the Boogie sound available to me. It cost me $455 second hand, which I thought was probably a bit too much really, but they are pretty rare and I had a wait a few months before I saw one advertised. However I have since seen them advertised for over $500.
Essentially it's a 2 channel Mesa pre amp in a box, with two 12AX7 tubes and 3 modes. You can only footswitch between 2 modes (Clean and solo, or blues and solo) but then there's a bypass switch that allows the guitar to go straight to your amp, so effectively you have 3 sounds at your immediate disposal, or even more if using a footswitchable amp. The way I use it is to mainly use the clean channel of my amp for my clean sound, but I also set the gain channel of my amp to have a bit of crunch. Then I use the V-Twin in Blues and Solo modes for extra crunch and my big solo sound.
The limitation is that both channels use the same controls - Gain, Master, Bass, Mid, Treble and Presence - so there is a certain amount of compromise between your sounds.
The back of the unit has dedicated outputs for host amps, power amps or recording consoles.
These have not been made for a while as of 2012.
