Running in stereo gives your guitar (or any other instrument) a much bigger and 'wider' sound. It makes it sound like your guitar is coming from everywhere and fills up the room. Virtually all recorded guitar sounds are recorded in stereo to give it a full "presence" and a big sound. You can particularly hear this effect when you listen via headphones.

 

To run your guitar stereo in live situation you can do it via the following ways.

 

1. Use a stereo amplifier such fender Princeton chorus or any digital modelling amp such “line 6” that is designated stereo (it will usually say something along the lines of 2 x 50 watts or similar.)

 

2. Use a modern digital guitar processor.

 

• Use any modern digital guitar processor such as Digitech, Zoom, Korg, etc. these units generally have two outputs (left/right).
• Then run two leads to two channels of a mixing desk or mixer/amp unit (so long as the PA system is running in stereo.)
• Then you "hard pan" each channel one left and one right.

 

Some mixing boards have stereo channels (left/right) where you can put both outputs of your processor into one channel. If you wish to hear your guitar separately you will still need to "monitor" your sound through some type of amp though, however many bands these days choose to run everything into the PA system and have no stage amps at all.

 

3. Use two amplifiers and have an effect processor mentioned above or any effect unit such as chorus or delay unit that has two outputs. One lead goes to one amp the other lead to the second amp.

 

The down side of this is the set up is more time consuming, requires double rigging and twice as much actual equipment, the result however is remarkably different from playing through a single mono amplifier.

 

Most "intelligent" harmony machine or pitch shifters will only sound good in a stereo configuration when set up to do complex harmonies such as thirds etc.

 

Do NOT be under the  false impression that running two speaker cabinets out of two outputs of one amp is stereo, this is NOT stereo it is just adding another speaker to give extra spread of sound. It does not add any actual power or create a stereo signal.