Your experience of recording guitar to DAW options

fretmeister

Guitar >  Helix with an effected signal and a di > Reaper.

Works great.

AlbertC

Surprised the Strymon Iridium hasn't been mentioned.
I use it into my Focusrite Scarlett. Simple solution. Sounds good. Does the job for me

Keefy

AlbertC said:

Surprised the Strymon Iridium hasn't been mentioned.
I use it into my Focusrite Scarlett. Simple solution. Sounds good. Does the job for me

Good point. Anything with decent amp/cab sims should be capable of good results.

Mickeyji

lukedlb said:

Keefy said:

Guitar > Revival Drive (amp sim) > Torpedo CAB (speaker sim) > DAW

Works for me.

Right, so I've installed the pulse loader with some free IRs from GuitarHack, plugged the guitar into the Revival Drive into the Presonus Firestudio Mobile into Garageband as an audio line in track with the pulse IR turned on and it still sounds pretty bad; better than before, but pretty bad nonetheless. Or am I expecting too much? Am I meant to be hearing a close approximation of my real amp on the headphones or is a tin can the best I can hope for?
Actually, the GarageBand amp option currently sounds better. I'll continue messing with it.

The amp sims that come with Garageband aren't very good, imo. Download the free trial versions of Neural DSP and Scuffham S-Gear amp sims and run them as AU/VST plugins in Garageband to find out if this method will work for you.They'll sound about as good as software simulations can possibly sound at this point in time.

andy_k

I usually just go DI into Reaper, and add Overloud THU plugin to get my final sound in the mix. I have a pedalboard set up with pedals going from an ABY splitter, A is a DI into Scarlett input A, B is a chain of Kotzen flyrig>MXR 5150 OD> Phase 90> Mooer Reecho>Mooer Radar into Scarlett input B.
Radar does a good job of power amp and impulse responses, and is a great little device.
I can monitor and record my pedal effected sound, which is close to how I like it, and also record a DI which can be tweaked in Overloud THU. (this was the Slate replacement for S gear )
Most of the time I don't bother with the pedalboard, and just use 2 tracks recorded with THU, I get latency down to a bearable level usually.

lukedlb

Stuckfast said:

There are other options. For instance, you could record the DI'd signal and use an amp simulator as a placeholder sound. Then, when you feel able to make some noise, you can re-amp that signal through a real amplifier and play around with mic positions until you have it sounding like you want, and record that.

Forgive me, Stuckfast, it took me a while to understand. Please correct me if I have misunderstood your suggestion:

Play a DI'd signal into your DAW (use an amp simulator as a general sound). Then when it comes time to do a decent Final take, you re-amp the signal from your DAW into the amp (through a regular guitar input?) and then with a Sound Engineer's hat on, you have all the liberty of moving the microphone/s position/s to get the best 'recorded sound' and then hit the record button.

However, you would require a decent amp simulator in the first place to get a good feel/recording, wouldn't you? As every amp/pedal I own reacts differently to my playing, I fail to see how this could be a solution.
However, if you recorded from the LINE OUT of your real amp at a bedroom level, then this process of re-amping does sound very attractive, since you can raise the volume to the amp's sweet spot, mess with tone/drive. To a certain extent, a loop pedal could do this.