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hello everyone.,
first things first.., feels great to learn dat ders soo much for beginners like me to learn here..! glad to join u guys.., glad to be here..! :)
umm coming to the point i have a band., nd we need to record a demo at the earliest., i hav cakewalk Sonar 8 and nuendo 4 wid sum decent plugins., i guess wud do fr demo purpose..! i wish to record sum stuff at my home using my pc..!
the problem m facing is that the electric guitars are not sounding much.. (i did with my acoustics nd m pretty certain dey did well in terms ov volume)
now m wondering if i wud need to use some preamp for recording e-guitars.., what do u suggest i shud do..?

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Boswell Thu, 11/10/2011 - 09:42

Hi, and welcome!

What are you plugging your electric guitars into? Do they have their own amplifiers and you record the amplifier output with a microphone, or are you plugging the guitar directly into an interface on the computer? If through an interface, what type? Are you recording one instrument at a time ("tracking"), or the whole band at once?

praniit Thu, 11/10/2011 - 17:37

umm., i didn use an external interface as such.., for acoustic guitar i plugged it to my sound card and found the sound quite satisfying..! :)
nw bout the electric guitars i guess i'll have to use an interface o sumthing of that sort to improve input.., coz thats really sounding low.., :/
P.S. m certain, ders nothing wrong wid my electric pick ups., dey sound great live..! ;)

nd well here's a link to an acoustic demo i justed recorded to give u an hint ov how the acoustic guitar's sounding like.., it still needs much of mastering job but do check it out... [[url=http://[/URL]="http://soundcloud.c…"]acoustic demo for boswell by Praniith Rao on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free[/]="http://soundcloud.c…"]acoustic demo for boswell by Praniith Rao on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free[/]

Boswell Fri, 11/11/2011 - 03:16

The general rule is that for an electric guitar you use a microphone to record the acoustic output of the guitar amplifier, and for an acoustic guitar you use (a different type of) microphone to record the instrument itself. This rule is not fixed, and you can get different tones by varying it and maybe, for example, blending in the pickup signal with the acoustic sound. Don't forget that the room in which you do the recordings has a BIG effect on the results.

The point about recording the guitar amplifier is that an electric guitar performance has three components: the player, the guitar and the amplifier. All contribute to the sound, but the amplifier is what the sound comes out of, so that's what you record. There is a technique known as re-amping where you record a scratch track with the raw electric guitar pickup signal and then when mixing the tracks you send the raw signal to one or more amplifiers and use a microphone to re-record the amplifier outputs for the final mix.

What you should be considering is an external pre-amplifier/interface that plugs into your computer's FireWire or USB port and can take microphone inputs or a direct signal from the guitar pickups. Tell us how many instruments you would be recording at any one time, and we can give you some ideas as to what you should be looking at. I know you may have a different selection available in your country and the price structure may be very different from that here in the UK or in the USA, but we can give you some pointers about what to look for and what to avoid.