How To Use Send and Return On Guitar Amp?

Send and return on guitar amp The pedals are designed to see an unbalanced, high impedance signal such as that from guitar pickups so you would need a re amp device (or use a passive DI box in reverse) to properly match the pedal inputs for the best sound. I would take the pedal output and run it to a DI box then to a mic input on the mixer as the return. Driving the pedals as is from the aux send won’t damage anything but you’ll likely run into distortion and mis-matched impedance ugliness in the sound.

If your mixer send/return is unbalanced, it’s probably hi-z too. Try and see if you like the results. Many people have successfully used guitar effects at line level with no extra stuff (read about Tchad Blake’s use of a Classic Sansamp). Often the signal to noise is much improved this way – although the saturation characteristics are completely different – you will need much lower settings, which also helps reduce the noise.

A Reamp box is excellent for reducing a hot balanced output down to a cooler unbalanced guitar level. A DI box used in reverse goes the wrong way – it boosts the signal, which is exactly what you don’t want. It unbalances the signal, but doesn’t attenuate. That’s why a Reamp box is very different from a DI box, and ideally uses a different transformer. The overhead of using a Reamp and then a DI is probably worse than just using the pedal direct – if possible. Things like impedance matching are fairly fickle – you just have to use whatever works best.