Kevin's Watch

Yo.

I have a question about the 'proper' way to record an electric guitar. What I've been doing is plugging the headphone output of my amp straight into the breakout box for my sound card, and recording that way, but this produces are really horribly clipped and noisy recording. Far more noise than I get when I just actually play with the amp. I was wondering if anyone out there had any advice on the proper way to record an electric guitar. I'm under the impression that the right way is to use a microphone infront of the amp, and I was wondering if anyone had an suggestions or a personal favourite way to do it. I'm fairly sure I still need to get a noise supressor widget/pedal/thingy, though, to get rid of what noise there is just from mains hum and generic fingering noises.

Thank you in advance.

It depends.

I use an RP-10 which has a cabinet emulator. IOW, I can go right from my effects board into a recording device. That will get the sound of the guitar onto a recorded medium of some sort.

I prefer to mic the cabinet and the room. I feel that gives a much better feeling of "space".

Why not just get a Line 6 pod? It was designed to be used for recording.

Danke.

dANdeLION wrote:Why not just get a Line 6 pod? It was designed to be used for recording.

Great Balls!

I've really got to stop relying on 20 year old technology.

Cail wrote:Great Balls!

Why, zank you, doktor!

I'm with you Cail. Old school is best. And exactly what you said, you get a better feel of sound from the guitar and the space, depending on how close you mic the amp.

Obviously the same goes for drums (my speciality) ... although more of a frik'n pain in the @ss to set up properly, you still want to mic the drums and the room as best you can.
Take care of the rest at the mixing board.

To clarify things, my recording set up currently includes:

My Guitar.
My Amp.
My Computer.

And that's about it. Connecting the Amp directly to the mike jack on my sound card sounds horrible. And I'm pretty sure I need to get a Noise Gate, as I think it's called, to get rid of the humming.

Yes. Noise gates are imperative.

Thanks to dAN, my RP-10 will be for sale shortly, and it has one.....

Heh, that Digitech isn't so bad that you have to sell it; just get a Line 6 Toneport (it's their USB interface thingie) and you'll be up to date, assuming you have Cakewalk or something equivalent.