On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 10:20:16AM -0400, Rob wrote: > On Friday 25 July 2003 05:54, Chris wrote: > > curious to hear how you guitarists out there handle your sound. Do you > > all go direct in now? Or do some of you still mic your cabnet? I still > > I don't wire my guitar or bass directly into my Roland external USB sound > thingy, though I probably could. Hmm... unless your guitar has active electronics (e.g. it has a battery), you will get a quiet, dull, lifeless sound if you plug it directly into a line-level device like a computer audio interface. A few audio interfaces (notably some of the USB ones) have an input that is designed to be used for guitar or bass. If you don't have one of those, you need some way to get your guitar up to line level. The common "professional" approach is to go through a direct box which produces a microphone-level signal that is then run into a typical mic preamp, and from *there* you go into the soundcard. But even when all this is done, you now have a very clean, sparkly, decidedly non-amp-like tone; to most guitarists, it will sound horrible :-) So you need some kind of processing to do the distortion and frequency shaping and compression that amplifiers & guitar speakers do. You could either do as Rob does: > I run them through one of a couple cheap > DSP amp simulators I have, I think made by Boss. I was previously using a > direct box or just plugging in and always ran into one problem or another. > Noise, ground hum, bad levels, whatever. hmm... bad direct box? > I would say I'm more of a keyboardist who uses guitars for effect than an > actual guitarist though, so maybe there are downsides I haven't thought of. die-hard guitar enthusiasts are (rightly) skeptical of amp & speaker simulation, it's not hard to get it to sound pretty close but it IS really hard to get it 100% there. Anyway, there are a million amp & speaker simulators on the market now, from sansamp to the line 6 POD models etc etc. You could also just use LADSPA effects, either in your recording app or with an effects-box app like Ecamegapedal or Jack Rack. hmmm, i'm going to go play with those a bit :-) -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's THE STEEL JUJITSU MASTER! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)
