It's hard to resist talking about gear.
I have two primary rigs, one fairly simple, the other a little less so.
The simple rig, not pictured, is a Mesa Boogie MKIV 1x12 combo. I keep a delay in the effects loop and the unit is tucked into the cabinet and plugged into the accessory outlet in the back of the amp. Setup is easy; pull the footswitch out of the back of the amp, plug in a guitar and play.
The more involved rig is this:
The input and the output:
These days, I'm playing an Ernie Ball Music Man Steve Morse model guitar. As much tonal variety as the rest of the rig provides, I find myself switching presets (equivalent of amp channels) comparatively seldom, as the pickup combinations on this guitar provide a pretty amazing range of sounds by themselves.
My cabinets are compact, but have low end response of a bigger cab. They are of my own design and construction, using JBL guitar speakers (no longer made, but somewhat similar to EVMs in power handling and response). The cabinets are closed backed and ported to give the boxes a bump at about 100 hz. It doesn't have the knock associated with some 4x12's but they go loud, have acceptable dispersion and quite good low end for a small guitar cab.
In between is this stuff:
In the rack is a Fractal Audio Axe-FX Ultra preamp and signal processor, amplified by a Mesa 2:90. I seldom run the power amp so hard it goes non-linear, so the power amp could be any number of things and would still sound good. The tone shaping in this setup comes from the Axe-FX, which offers unbelievably real models of 70 different amps.
This processor replaced a Mesa Tri-Axis preamp. The Tri-Axis had a wide range of very good Mesa tones and the Axe-FX nails all of them. Before deciding to keep the Fractal unit, I replicated the six patches I used most in the Tri-Axis and neither you nor I would be able to tell the difference in tone, feel or response to pickup and volume level changes at the guitar.
The Fractal also provides all of the DSP in the setup, and most of my patches have drive, reverb, long delay, multi-tap delay, wah-wah, a harmonizer, phaser, flanger and chorus in the signal chain. In actual practice, very little of this is engaged most of the time. I generally leave reverb off, and the delay is on, with the tempo set by a tap footswitch.
Rather than turning delay on and off, I blend it in or out with a volume pedal. The ratio of wet/dry can range from 100% dry to about 42% wet, but this is configurable. I like this approach to using delay, as it can be feathered in and out of the sound without abrupt perceptible changes. In lines with longer note durations, I like the delay a bit wet to help notes sing, but in a faster passage, I'll usually pull the delay down so it doesn't garble the individual notes. If the last note in the run will be held, I fade the delay in and overall it's hard to tell it was ever gone.
The setup is controlled by this pedal board:
The blue unit in the foreground is a Digitech JamMan looper. To its right is the Fractal Audio foot controller which has assignable buttons for just about anything the Axe-FX can do. The two volume pedals function as expression pedals, one dedicated to delay and the other to Wah. They can be assigned to any continuously variable parameter or even several at once. One pedal sweep can even perform inverse functions on different parameters simultaneously. For example, I have one patch where rocking the pedal forward reduces gain while slightly increasing output level to compensate, and also blends in delay and chorus. It was fairly involved to set up, but it's dead simple to use.
The connections are simplified with a custom snake, manufactured for me by guitarcables.com and a patch panel I built to place all interconnects between the pedal board and the Axe-FX on the front panel:
From left to right, the connections are: Powercon (A/C power), midi in, effects send (to get audio out of the Axe-FX into the looper), effects return (to get the signal back from the looper) and guitar in.
There are equivalent connections at the pedal board. The only difference between the connectors at each end are in the A/C power cable. I used Powercon on the patch panel to make it impossible to kick the power cable loose. The connector at the board is standard Edison, in case there is a problem with the snake cable, in which case a standard extension cord can supply power. All other connectors are standard and can be substituted with guitar cords and a midi cable. The female phone jacks at both ends are locking Neutriks to keep connections from getting kicked loose.
With this setup, there aren't a whole lot of tones I can't get pretty close. My go to sounds range from a couple of Fender cleans to a JCM 800 to various high gain amps, including a Cornford, Mesa MKII, a Friedman "Marsha," an Engl Powerball and a Dumble Super Overdrive. There are a ton of other models I haven't bothered with because these cover most of what I usually do, but there are usable Rectifiers, Uberschalls, etc. in there.
I'm trying to attain a smooth lead tone and an aggressive rhythm; one player I've always admired for his rhythm technique and tones is James Hetfield. 
Reading this thread makes me want another electric.
