DI out from amp into audio interface?

fujauroste

New member
Hi y'all, last night I was experimenting with my new Fishman Loudbox Mini Charge and had my acoustic guitar plugged into the 1/4 inch input and an SM57 plugged into the mic input. Then I used a mic cable to run out the back of the amp into my audio interface and recorded into Reaper from that.

The obvious downside is that my guitar and vocal track were summed to a single mono track, but aside from that, I'm wondering if there are any benefits or downsides to recording this way. It was nice to have monitoring from the amp while I was recording, and all the reverb/chorus effects from my pedals and the amp were captured in the amp's DI output. This made for a 'finished' track right off the bat that felt like it captured a performance and not someone tweaking parameters in the DAW.

Or consider this question: say I leave the mic out of the equation, and play guitar through my amp with effects, and capture that signal through my audio interface using the amp's DI out. Is the amp offering any 'ampy' goodness to the signal as opposed to just plugging my guitar straight into the DAW?
 
For electric guitar, the power amp and speaker are part of the sound. That's rarely the case for acoustic, so you're really not losing anything by going direct. If it sounds good it is good.
 
the only thing I can think of would make a difference, is the input impedance of the two interfaces (Loudbox vs. interface input). Which one would do the best job only you can tell ;-)
 
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