Managing pedals for a two channel amp

[Beo]

My Mesa Boogie F-30 tube amp has two channels with a single guitar input and an FX Loop with dry/wet blend. Right now, I have all my pedals before the amp and I'm not using the FX Loop. My clean channel is really nice, great for rhythm and takes pedals well. I'm really liking my gain channel more and more, especially now that I've reshielded my guitar and got noise a bit more under control. Also the gain channel has a great contour feature which gives great tone. The gain channel does not like pedals.

I'm guessing this is a common configuration, and there are a lot of players who like their clean channel for pedals and their gain channel by itself (or maybe with a simple booster or overdrive). My question is, are players doing a tap dance to engage their gain channel and turn off unwanted pedals/loops, or is there a smarter Pedal Chain / Amp Channel control method?

Thanks!
Travis

[Seljer]

The pros have guitar techs tapdancing for them 

It shouldn't be too hard to do though. If the amps channel switching require that you just short the connection in the cable to ground and if you forfeit any indicator LEDs you can just use one section of a 3DPT for the channel switching and the other to switch between two different loops of effects. I assuming the clean and dirty sound has enough of a difference to make it obvious what is selected

You could get a fancier system if you add some relays and such, then you'd add the ability to have two seperate effect chains in the fx loop as well as in front.

[Beo]

I was thinking something similar. I need to find out if my amp expects an on/off or a momentary signal for channel switching. But has anyone done something like this? Is it as useful as it sounds in practice?