help recording guitar

  • Thread starter Thread starter lothar
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lothar

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Here's the problem: When I playback my guitar recodring in cakewalk there are little pops that make it sound kind of like a record player.

Here's my setup: A fender princeton 65 amp, miced by an sm57 thats plugged into a mic pre which goes to an audiophile 2496 then plays out through roland ma-8 micro monitors.

What am I doing wrong?
 
Maybe it's the output from the preamp that's too loud, causing distortion... Dunno what else it could be..
 
Yeah, sounds like it might be digital clipping distortion from your description...
 
thanks guys..but I'm still a little confused.. If it is clipping thats occuring, wouldn't I be able to tell by the amplitude of the sound wave in cakewalk? Because none of the waves even come close to being too large. And when I play the sound back it never reaches 0 db. Is it because I'm recording the amp with the overdrive on? Or maybe the amp isnt loud enough?
 
Sounds like a system performance issue to me (IRQ conflict, background apps running, etc.). Could you describe your PC in detail? Has this happened before, or are you just using the system for the first time?
 
Im running win2000 off an 800mhz athlon thunderbird, with 128mb, 30gb hdd ata66, there is irq sharing on irq 11 but I heard thats normal. There are no background apps running and I unplug the ethernet cable whenever I record. What level do you guys usually record at -10db? -6db? This is my first time recording so I can't say that is has happened before.
 
As a general rule, you should try to have your sound card on a dedicated IRQ. Are the pops random, ie in different places every time you play it, or are they actually in the track? What software are you using and have you tried increasing the latency to see if the pops go away? Do you have DMA enabled on your hard drive?

As far as recording levels go, I try to get everything as hot as possible without clipping. So thats as close to 0dB as I can get. I usually leave more headroom for snare drum and other instruments with loud transients, but try to crank it up for distorted guitars, etc. You lose bits with low levels!!!
 
Gnarled, the pops are actually on the track. They kind of sound like the electric shock you get from static when you touch your shirt after you take it out of the dryer. I'm using home studio 2002 and yeah I tried to increase the latency. How can I get my sound card its own IRQ? Its seems as though windows 2000 puts every pci card on the same IRQ even I have IRQ's to spare. DMA is enabled.
 
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a compressor/limiter can also assist here in keeping the peak levels at or around where you want them before they distort in digital correct me if iam wrong guys as iam just learning as well :-)
 
Lothar, I had a similar problem on my rig but I quickly realized that even though the tracks do not appear to be clipping in Cake, you can overdrive the input stage of your mic pre. My Joe Meek, tough as it is, will send pops and clicks to the hard drive even if the output level is calibrated properly. Roll off the input stage.
 
thanks for the suggestions everyone. Today I performed a test where I installed the audiophile on a 300mhz compaq presario with the same software and guess what..It worked fine on there. Therefore the problem must be with one of the following:

-windows2000
-via kt133 chipsets
-abit kt7-raid motherboards
-athlon processors
-geforce2 mx cards
-a combination of any or all of these

I tried everything to get it to work right with the custom pc: making sure there was no irq conficts, turning down the hardware acceleration, switching from ata66 to at100...etc. It probably has something to do with pci. I think it might be better to buy a namebrand budget pc to record however since they all come with windows xp I'm still kinda worried. outpost.com has a presario 1.1ghz for $499.
 
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