Do I need DI or "breakout box"?

[Nightfire]

I run my acoustic straight into my mixer, from the "tape out" I run it into my soundcard. Do I need a DI in between guitar and mixer?
Also, I heard its best to use a breakout box between mixer and soundcard, is this necesary? What exactly would change the sound?


Mike

 

[Freddy]

For an acoustic guitar, you are really better off using microphones for recording.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but true nevertheless.

 

[Nightfire]

I dont know if this makes sense, but I run the guitar into the mixer, and I also run a mic (micing at 12th fret) at the same time into the mixer to get a "fuller" sound if that makes sense. That may be the wrong way of going about, I dont know, Im new at this haha.


Mike

 

[Freddy]

I dont know if this makes sense, but I run the guitar into the mixer, and I also run a mic (micing at 12th fret) at the same time into the mixer to get a "fuller" sound if that makes sense. That may be the wrong way of going about, I dont know, Im new at this haha.


Mike

That could work for you. Acoustic guitar is very much a matter of taste and is (imho) hard to get right. There are a bunch of articles on it.. one here .. http://www.guitarists.net/lessons/view.php?id=170

You could also search these forums for "acoustic guitar".

Mic placement and experimentation is the key.

 

[TripleJ]

You don't need a DI box between your mixer and your computer. How you are doing it is fine.

When people mean breakout box they mean a different soundcard that has a breakout box (a breakout box just has all the inputs/outputs on a seperate box that you can place away from your computer for easy access, instead of having to crawl behind your pc all the time to change leads).

The benefit of a new soundcard would be more simultaneous channels to be recorded aswell as better sound quality and latency. If how you are doing it now works then I would stick with that.

So you are running into the mixer from your guitars pickup as well as micing it? Try this for a little more flexibility...

Keep on doing what your doing but pan the pickup channel hard left (all the way left) and the microphone channel hard right. That way when you get the tracks up on your computer you can have two mono tracks (left and right) with different signals to work with.

Basically it just means that you can alter the levels of each method of recording after you've recorded, aswell as add effects etc. It'll just give you a little more flexibility.

If I've been confusing just ask and I'll clarify anything.