Recording a Guitar! HELP!

[matt1345]

I'm new to the forums and brand new to home recording (the band and I have decided to record ourselves to save $) and I have a very basic question. I'm doing everything I can to learn as much as I can. I need advice on recording the guitar. Right now I'm trying new things and I have a basic grasp on mic placement but I can't get a good sound at all.
I'm using a brand new SM58. It is plugged through a Behringer UB 1002 mixer and a Behringer UCA222 soundcard which is connected to the usb of my PC. The software I'm using is Mixcraft 5.0. There are no effects in this chain leading to the computer. It's just mic into the mixer, mixer connected to sound card, sound card to computer to Mixcraft.
Most importantly the tone I hear once I play back is flat and in no way represents what I hear live. On top of that it clips terribly. And forget about it when I add a second guitar track. You can't even decipher notes it's so distorted during play back. The whole reason I bought the mixer was to get rid of that nasty distortion and to find a clean, faithful reproduction of the guitar (I don't like P.O.D. or recording straight into the mixer, I just wanna figure out how to record a live guitar). I have the level up but the gain way down and the wavelengths shown on screen aren't big and spiky at all. WHAT am I doing wrong!? I'm scowering the internet but all the articles say similar things. None of them talk about recording after recommending what mic to use. Since I know I'm following "industry standard" micing techniques I figure there must be something very wrong with the recording set up. Can anyone blow my mind and offer a solution? Do I need a compressor? Why does the tone sound so flat? WHY does it clip?

 

[ido1957]

I used one of these UCA222's for a short while. They work fine but are not super quality. Same as your soundcard would probably give you. It's advantage is that it's USB.
Okay so analyze your signal path and modify every source until you figure it out.
- amp - does it sound good? Turn it up so you can hear it...
- mic - assume okay as this is pretty standard (unless it's broken) try a voice to be sure.
- mixer - set the channel fader and main fader to 0 (middle or so). Set the eq knobs to the middle. Turn the channel gain up to a level where on mixer the signal is still in the green and sounds good on MIXER headphones. You may what to do this in two separate rooms so you get as much headphones as possible without amp noise. If it sounds sucky then your mixer is sucky. If you tweak the eq's maybe it will sound okay.
- UCA222 - now the level on your UCA222 set it to the middle and connect it to the computer. Set the computer software input to 0 and see if it clips the software in the meters. If so then turn down the uCA222 and try again. If it still clips then turn down the main fader on the MIXER. If it still clips turn down the channel fader. Eventually you should find the hottest signal the software can take without clipping. You can also turn down the input gain in the software so you have a lot of places where clipping is being caused.

 

[ido1957]

Do you have any clips we can hear of :
- what you get
- what you want to sound like