Legendary Mike Soldano and Bob Bradshaw meeting each other for the first time in years and go thru their memories on the good old rack days and how the X88IR and the SLO100R came to be.

Like many of Mike Soldano’s creations, the rackmount 100W Super Lead Overdrive was a product driven by the needs of professional touring guitarists. In the fall of 1987, Vivian Campbell (Dio, Whitesnake and Def Leppard), requested Mike to build him a couple of custom amps. Vivian heard the SLO100 Steve Lukather recently purchased and loved the way it sounded, especially the Overdrive channel.
Vivian was having Bob Bradshaw design a new rack system for him and wanted it to have the “Soldano” sound, but didn’t want the hassle of hauling around an additional flight case to contain these amps. At his request, Soldano built him two rackmountable, singlechannel SLO100s. Vivian didn’t need both of the channels the SLO offered, he was only interested in the Overdrive channel. It is these two single channel amps that inspired Mike to develop a fully featured SLO100 rackmount amp version for other guitarists who wanted an allinonecase rack system.
The initial idea for a threechannel Soldano rackmount guitar preamp came from Bob Bradshaw, rack builder to the stars.
According to Mike Soldano “If not for Bradshaw’s request, the X88R would never have happened. I thank Bob Bradshaw for his idea and for his trust in me to make it happen.”

Also in 1987, Steve Lukather began using the new Soldano SLO100 heads. And again, Bob Bradshaw built Steve’s rack system and toured with him to ensure it always worked flawlessly.

While visiting Bob’s shop in North Hollywood, Bob discussed with Mike what a pain it was to haul around three amps just so Steve could get his various sounds. Steve’s complicated wetdrywet rig also needed heavy dummy loads to get a low level “slave” signal from the power amp’s output to run into the effects. This large rig generated extra wear and tear and expense, as shipping and handling those heavy amps and load cabinets required more truck space and crew labor.

Mike agreed that using his SLO100 heads just to obtain a racksystemfriendly 0db output signal was inefficient. This was especially true because the SLO’s revolutionary cascading gain design already provided all of Soldano’s iconic tone in the preamp section.

Bob requested Mike to build an alltube preamp with three independent channels, clean, crunch, and overdrive, that could be integrated with his switching systems and replace all that heavy gear. When it was done, Bob wired it into Steve’s rack, it was big smiles all around and history was made.

By the Summer of 1988, Soldano developed a production version of this preamp, the first of which was purchased by Warren Cucurullo. The X88R was the first of its kind, and the first truly professional standalone guitar preamp.

More details on https://www.soldano.com