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suggestions for recording electric guitar


bluestraveler

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Hi,

I'm looking for suggestions as to how to get a decent electric guitar sound at home. I'm using Cubase with a Tascam US-122L soundcard. PC-wise, I'm running a Sony Vaio all-in- one desktop with Windows 7, 4GB RAM, and Intel Core 2 Duo Processor.

I'm happy with the sound of my hollowbody going straight into the soundcard, but can't get decent strat sounds at all.

I have a Boss ME70, but the overdrive sounds are horrible when recorded and the cleans sound like I'm using a digital processor. I've also tried a Fender GDEC 3 which I use for tutoring - great sounds, but has no line out, so you have to connect via USB and can only do so with everything coming out through the amp, which is hopeless for monitoring.

This week I tried the Guitar Rig 4 demo, and the sound were great, but the latency makes it unusable (tried altering the latency settings on my soundcard, but still loads of latency).

To use Guitar Rig in Cubase, I've opened it in the effects bart of the audio track - is there any other way to use it that might sort out the latency?

Any other ideas for software (or hardware) that has decent sounds and that actually works?

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Mic up your amp and run that into your soundcard.

shure sm57 items - Get great deals on Musical Instruments, Consumer Electronics items on eBay UK!

Always best to get the sound you want at the source, rather than modify it on your computer.

Agree with that, the only way to totally stop the signal sounding any way 'digital' is to mic up your amp then direct into the soundcard. That way you'll get exactly what comes out of the amp rather than adding any process to it.

Failing that, I use a Line 6 interface to connect the guitar to the soundcard, then use their Gearbox software for amp simulations etc. There will always be some elements of it sounding 'processed' but I've found with a bit of EQing you can get it sounding good.

If you tweak the settings in your soundcard / DAW etc then you can actually just record your raw guitar signal whilst the monitored signal that you hear through the headphones has all the effects etc on it. That way if you record something and don't like the effects on it, you don't have to re-record the whole part - just retweak the EQing etc.

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Have you tried the asio4all drivers to see if that helps the latency issue?

Also worth checking out this thread for recording discussion:

http://www.aberdeen-music.com/forums/musicians-corner/63494-whats-your-recording-setup-method.html

Thanks Chris - yes, tried that yesterday, but made no difference.

Thanks for the other suggestions. only have an SM58 in the house. What kind of mic would you recommend - a 57?

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Simply screw off your 58's ball shaped grill. It will then basically be like a 57 which will enable you to get closer to your speaker cone.

Make sure you have the most up to date drivers from the Tascam website.

Product: US-122L | TASCAM

Hope this helps

Thanks for the tip. Yes, updated the drivers this week as the pc is new and it's Windows 7 64bit so had to install the latest/ appropriate drivers. Will try out the mic tomorrow without grill...

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I've been messing around using my ME70 to record directly to my PC recently also. I've got a pretty untrained ear and I'm a fairly basic level guitarist, but I thought I managed to get it to sound not too bad in the half hour I played around with it the other night, this is a wee test recording I did:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12080050/toomuch_stereo.mp3

The setup was Guitar > ME 70 > Sound Blaster XtremeMusic Soundcard > Audacity recording software. I didn't think it sounded too "digital", but then again I was only playing around with fairly high gain and od/distortion, so it's maybe a bit harder to tell? If I remember right, the recording was using the Classic amp model, 3/4's gain and I might be wrong, but I think I used the blues OD and some compression on the "solo" setting. Was just pratting around with it really, but I think it sounded alright, but you might think otherwise! :up:

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Hi jgomez

That sound you have there is pretty good mate. Totally usable.

Cheers mate :) I was pretty impressed with it as I had literally only played around with the preamp settings for 30 minutes or so, previously I had just used the ME70 as FX through my amp. I did find though that adding OD/DS to any of the amps other than the Clean setting made the sound pretty digital. The nice thing is though you can create presets using purely the cosm effects, so you can say set the amp model to Lead Stack (I think this is the Marshall emulator, correct me if I'm wrong), then you can save a high gain preset and a low gain preset, seems to work pretty well.

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