(1) It’s for a Wet/Dry/Wet configuration. It’s a stereo configuration made popular starting from in the 80’s due to rack units that would only give a wet signal. It’s still very popular. This is where a center amplifier or PA speaker gets the dry guitar signal without effects (100% of the signal without effects = analog dry-through), then there are two amplifiers or PA speakers on either side of that in stereo that get 100% of the effects signal with the dry analog guitar signal removed by the pedal(kill dry = 100% wet, 0% dry). It’s used for various reasons; many people who are using it for overdrives use it to thicken their overdriven tone as can be seen in this pretty good explainer video.
I’ll spare the technical details of how I’m using it, but it put it simply, I have a setup I’m using to go from dry in one song, to wet/dry/wet for one song, then back to dry, via MIDI. I’m using a Duophony and a MIDI controller to accomplish this. The Duophony can go from a serial X to Y signal, to parallel where the signal splits into an X loop and Y loop where the X has all-wet pedals and the X has all-drypedals. Pedals like the Eventide H90 have a kill-dry mode.
The Quad Cortex can do analog dry-through by going into its relay bypass mode. It can do kill-dry by setting each block to 100% wet. It’s capable of doing all of these, but it doesn’t make it easy for me to switch this on for an entire preset where every block goes to either mode, via MIDI.
It’s too much to re-create all the presets with dry, then all the presets with wet, and then to keep them all in sync so that any creative changes in one are reflected in the other. It would be expedient if Neural DSP made a kill-dry mode to do this for any preset.
(2) Another area where I see people using a kill-dry mode is with ambient guitar. Lots of ambient pedalboards use a 100% wet signal on their delays or reverbs and certain other effects.
Here is a link for reference.
Does that give better context??