Rebuilding my 2204 clone - looking to have 2 channels

[Badside]

Love my 2204 clone, it's got some mods of course: less NFB, Presence circuit modified to Recto style (effectively a pre-PI cut control), smaller coupling cap after 1st stage, hot-biased 2nd stage (2k7 IIRC instead of 10k), I think that's most of it… and a Metro loop kit.

I'm rebuilding it as this was my first serious build and it's pretty sloppy (been working reliably for 2 years of touring though!), which means a brand new circuit board and chassis.

My main gripe right now is the single-channel thing. It's not that bad as I can ride the volume knob on my guitar and hit an OD pedal for heavier songs, but I often wish I could instantly footswitch to a cleaner tone as we play a wide variety of covers and do long non-stop medley where I have to be all over the place tone-wise.

I'm thinking of 2 options:
1- Have 2 gain controls on a footswitch
2- Make it a dual channel à la Plexi (except with MV), but add a boost stage to the normal channel effectively making it a 2204 channel and use an A/B switch.

I'm leaning towards option 2 as I can tweak both channels to tailor their sound and have some channel specific pedal after the A/B switch (ex: OD stays on dirty channel). Since that leaves one triode half unused, I'd probably parallel it to gain slightly more gain
On the other hand, this means an extra preamp tube (and I have to build this in a 16.5" chassis, so things would be getting cramped), and hiss from the unused channel being possibly a problem (although from experience, my amp is pretty silent when you ground the input like I assume an A/B switch does).

Any thoughts?

[thejaf]

I'm reworking my project amp now, going with a circuit that's a mixture of 2203 and Bogner Shiva, and I've inlcuded a switch to change out the V1B cathode from 10K to 2K7-1uF combo, to hopefully switch between more stock Marshallesque gain and the hot-rodded Shiva style. Seemed the easiest switch at current, and could also be easy to adapt to footswitch if it works as planned.

[roberto]

I prefer unbypassed 2nd stages in 2203 like configurations.

You can use a plexi-2203 like switch (to go directly from 1st stage to 3rd), with a dual gain pot and a dual master (or using the master volume only for the 2203 circuit).

[Gaz]

Maybe this, only with relays for footswitching.

[azrael]

I prefer unbypassed 2nd stages in 2203 like configurations.

You can use a plexi-2203 like switch (to go directly from 1st stage to 3rd), with a dual gain pot and a dual master (or using the master volume only for the 2203 circuit).

I've seen people do this before with Peavey VTMs, an amp very close to an 800.

I just don't have any concentric 1M pots....