Guitar to PC

dori2o

I've just been given some cool software. It's an old version of Cubase music studio. I want to mess about with it and and lay some guitar riffs down. Can anyone advcise if there is any kind of adaptor I could use to plug my guitar into my computer.

vyseyboy

You can go straight from the guitar output to the sound card's line-in via a 1/4 inch instrument jack to 3.5 mm step-up adapter, then a standard double ended instrument cable, but it sounds god-awful, something to do with impedance matching...

So really you need some kind of pre-amp.

What I do is use my cheapie marshall practise amp. It has a headphone socket. So the guitar is plugged in as normal, through effects, and an instrument cable connects between the sound card line-in and the headphone-out socket on the amp (using the1/4 inch to 3.5 mm step up adapter thing.)

I'm sure there's a better way of describing the adapter above, but here's a picture (hotlinked :embarasse,) speaks a thousand words:

http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pics/products/7/3/4/369734.jpg

P.S. Make sure the output on the pre-amp or whatever you use is high (line-level) and the input volume in the software / using the soundcard driver is low. This combo ensures lower noise levels in the recording, which is definately a problem for cheaper sound cards.

FreheitOverture

There is also a USB adapter you can get which plugs standard instrument cable into and then connects to your computer via USB
http://www.firebox.com/product/2002/USB-Guitar-Link

weegie.geek

It should be noted that you really want the latency as low as possible, so you want to be using ASIO for the soundcard. Using through normal directsound, the delay is noticeable, especially if you're running it through some VST effects.

A lot of cards won't have ASIO drivers, so you might have luck with ASIO4ALL but it can be horrendously unstable on some hardware.

M-Audio do some nice USB audio interfaces that'll let you record in great quality and low latency.

dori2o

Wow, great information there. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Once I get the hardware sorted I'm going to have hours of fun with this.