Recording Guitar - Soundblaster & Cakewalk

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sydney
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Sydney

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Hello all,

I recently installed Soundblaster Live and Cakewalk ProAudio 9 on my computer. I'm trying to make a WAV file of a guitar with distortion, and I haven't yet figured out how to do this.

Am I on the right track by saying the following?:

1) The guitar should be plugged into Soundblaster Live and the switch set to Line In 2 rather than Mic.

2) The guitar needs to first be ran through an amp before plugged into Line In 2 in order to make a recording.

3) I may be able to utilize the EAX control which came with Soundblaster to get a distortion effect.

I'm really not sure about any of these statements are true. I'm also not sure how I work Cakewalk into this either. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sydney
 
get a mic

Okay i am no expert, but i do use a soundblaster to record ditorted and clean guitar. One thing that will almost NEVER yield good results is plugging your amp or guitar straight into the line in. You will want to buy a Mic (SM57 is a good bet) and a preamp and place the mic in front of the guitar amp, then plug the mic into the preamp, and then plug the preamp into the line input on your card. Also if you tell us your what type of equipment you are using and what kind of sound you are trying to obtain then we may be able to offer more specific tips.

Have Fun
Simon

P.S.
Don't use digital effects to rty and distort your guitar, use external distortion of some sort.
 
A typical guitar signal is not at Line level, so you could plug it straight into the SB Live's LiveDrive as if it were a mic, and use the preamp gain knob to tame the levels. (Am I correct in assuming you have the LiveDrive?)

You can only plug the signal from an amp into the card if the amp has a direct recording output. In that case, yes, you'd set it at Line level.

Neither of these methods are likely to give you wonderful results. Direct recording of guitar is usually death to good tone unless you use something special like the Johnson J-Station or the Line 6 POD.


Not sure if the EAX stuff will give you any decent distortion. It's mostly reverb and echo and spatialization to give the effect that the sound is in some sort of acoustic space ala an open field, a cave, a hallway, etc.

It is possible to take a prisitine signal from the guitar and run it through a DirectX plugin in Cakewalk. In fact, Pro Audio 9 comes with a lite version of their amp simulator effect. It's limited but it might do the job for you. There's also something called ReValver that costs about $99 (it's included with the upgrade from Proo Audio 9 to SONAR XL). I haven't had too much opportunity to try it yet but it's billed as a sort of software version of a POD or similar processor. No reason why it shouldn't potentially sound wonderful, depending of course on how well done it is...
 
Broadly speaking there are two ways to get a good guitar sound into your sound card.

The first is to record the natural distortion that your amp produces. Like 2lim said the way to do this is use a mic (like an SM-57) to record the actual amp sound. The mic will require either a preamp or a small mixer (which has at least one mic preamp) to get the signal up to line level, so you can feed it into your sound card.

The second is to use a unit like a DOD amp modeler which is an effect box that puts out its own line level signal. With this you skip the guitar amp and plug right into the unit, then run that into your sound card line-in.

You do NOT want to use the mic-in connector of your sound card (if you have one) because the tiny pre-amp in sound cards is not good enough for anything other than spoken words.

Hope that helps....
 
Thanks all for the great info. It definately gives me something to think about.

I'm mostly going to be doing keyboard recording. I'm totally surprised how clear of a WAV recording I can make plugging a keyboard in Line In (Soundblaster LiveDive) and recording in Cakewalk. I was hoping the same would go for guitar, but so far it doesn't sound very good (lots of static). I don't have much of a guitar set up...just electric guitar and a very cheap amp. I was hoping to not invest any more, but it sounds like I may have to in order to get a good distorted guitar sound.

I've heard the term "preamp" used often, but have not yet seen or used one. Any advice on what type of preamp, what brand, where to get one etc?
 
Sydney,

If you are talking about a preamp to use for recording electric guitars, particularly distorted electric guitars, your best bet these days is one of the modeling devices that use software to mimic the waveforms produced by a variety of real amplifiers. Johnson has just dropped the price of their J-Station device to $149. Yamaha makes a highly-regarded one called the DG-Stomp, and Line 6 makes the POD. Almost every guitar effects unit these days seems to have some form of amp/cabinet emulation and a direct line out.

General-purpose preamps can be used but they are usually very clean hi-fi devices, and a hi-fi recording of a signal from a guitar pickup is not a happy sound. Nearly every mixer on the market has 2 or more mic preamps for use with microphones. There are also stand-alone ones like the Midiman Audio Buddy, the ART Tube MP, Presonus Blue Tube, etc., etc., in every possible price point between under $100 to well over $2000...

-AlChuck
 
You could use Cool Edit rather than Cakewalk.
Just a suggestion, it's much more stable etc.

(hey cool this is my 50th post happy birthday to me:D)
 
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