Double Cross Footswitch System

by: James Brown

Well, I keep bringing up the footswitch, and I’ve made a bunch of headway on it.  It’s a complicated system that handles MIDI as well as provides a 5 button footswitch function via a single stereo cable….kind of like the one on the Coupe.  As a player, I’ve always hated relying on DIN jacks and things like that for a footswitch cables.  For one thing, they can get damaged easily, but also they’re hard to replace in an emergency.  So on the Defender, Coupes, and Double Cross all the footswitches use standard mono or stereo 1/4″ guitar cords.  It costs a little bit more and the technology takes a little bit longer, but ultimately it’s much better.

Here’s the first footswitch system patched into the NAMM 08 prototype.  It was a scary mess:

After I got it working with the rest of the amp, I had to get a new set of circuit boards with the extra transistors and things to drive the channel switching, effects loop, and boost relays properly.  Earlier this week, I received the ‘final’ circuit boards, and now I’m busy comparing them to the previous version to make sure I didn’t lose the tone in the process of implementing this.  So far so good.

The footswitch is pretty cool, and it’s all metal, so you won’t tear it up.  We made it so that it has a separate button for each channel, a boost, and an effects loop switch.  The channel buttons have a neat twist:  If you hit the channel you want, it will go there of course.  But if you hit it again, the amp toggles back to the previous channel.  This way you can use it to punch over to a channel and back real quickly without having to look down again.   So it works more like a stompbox in front of the amp would.

The MIDI part of the footswitch system allows you to access the channels, boost, and effects loop by sending a MIDI preset # to the amp.  If you have a MIDI pedal, all you have to do is patch it into your effects products, then from them into the Double Cross’ MIDI IN jack.  To set up a preset, you just step on the MIDI pedal preset (1 for instance) and your effects unit will go to that preset.  Then you channel select, select the Boost and/or the effects loop of the Double Cross using its normal footswitch.  Then you just press and hold the STORE button on the back of the amp.  From then on, when the amp receives that MIDI preset #, it will perform those footswitch functions.  AND, you can still use your amp’s regular footswitch too.