Guitarists...

[Meef Chaloin]

ok been mentioned quite a few times but ive never got to the bottom of this.

how do you guitarists set your stuff up to loop live and also monitor? Ive always just plugged the guitar straight in & used a amp emulator but the latency is just slightly too much for me to do this effectively. Ive thought about using a preamp, and splitting the output of a pedal so that one goes to the amp & one goes to ableton but its gonna sound quite different from playing live to looping this way. Ive also thought about sending a line from the amp (line out) to the computer but im not sure how well this would work (ive heard its a bad idea to try this?). Ive also looked at the POD & the rest of those but from what i can see ive still got the same problem as spliting the signal from an FX pedal.

so what do you use & how do you do it?

[mw]

ok been mentioned quite a few times but ive never got to the bottom of this.

how do you guitarists set your stuff up to loop live and also monitor? Ive always just plugged the guitar straight in & used a amp emulator but the latency is just slightly too much for me to do this effectively. Ive thought about using a preamp, and splitting the output of a pedal so that one goes to the amp & one goes to ableton but its gonna sound quite different from playing live to looping this way. Ive also thought about sending a line from the amp (line out) to the computer but im not sure how well this would work (ive heard its a bad idea to try this?). Ive also looked at the POD & the rest of those but from what i can see ive still got the same problem as spliting the signal from an FX pedal.

so what do you use & how do you do it?

guitar>fx>amp>mic>ableton...

so i loop a mic'd up amp...to set it up live its a case of getting the right levels between your amps volume and whats coming out of the PA

to rec and loop the parts i use a digitech midi pedal

to monitor i use a dedicated output from my s/c (saffire)...basically the its the track (channel 1/2 mix) mixed with my mic in and with a metronome click... this id fed to a headphone amp and i use in-ear headphones

[dj superflat]

i have this mesa power amp pedal (for real tube goodness), used to split sound to computer and house, but the slight difference in timing drove me nuts on relatively clean sounds. so now i just use live with some plug ins, the latency doesn't bother me too much, particularly when i'm using reaktor patches to mess with the guitar anyway. point is, the thing out of the mesa pedal is a line out, never seemed to bother the computer, don't see why it would, though perhaps i stupidly almost fried my system or somesuch.

[mikemc]

I use a small mixer, run guitar through pedal effects to mixer then route to track in Live on computer using effects send, run computer back in through tracks in mixer to sound system, mixer mains to sound system. Latency causes a slight doubling delay, mixed with primary doesn't matter I like the sound of it.

It is likely not the most clever technique, likely doesn't do exactly what you want and it involves (relatively inexpensive) outboard hardware, but I like the way it sounds.