Recording Guitar in Ableton

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:05 am

Timur - that link totally backs up what you've been saying. I'd still like to sit down and figure it out from a techie standpoint.

anyway, props for being on point the whole time and being cool. where did you learn all this? reading as a music geek or did you have some good work experiences?

btw I pronounce your name like 'Timmy' in South Park. TIMUR!!

FavoriteStation · Post by **FavoriteStation** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:34 am

I just mic my guitar amp, and use my a dynamic mic (sm57) and just plug it in the the mic 1 in on my motu. It's the best way to get good fidelity. Do you have an I/O to use?

knotkranky · Post by **knotkranky** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:46 am

Ummm, I think Lowfront would like to know how to record "anything external" into Live.

Sounds like the dude needs a micPre or a little mixer regardless.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 2:36 am

agreed but I think the OP checked out a while ago and the thread's gone down the rabbit hole.

Homebelly · Post by **Homebelly** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:24 am

I use jim dunlop medium picks!!!

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:36 am

I use yellow picks only, 20 years and only yellow picks.

knotkranky · Post by **knotkranky** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:43 am

Funny thing about me and picks...

I'll buy a 100, in 4 weeks lose 99 of them and then keep the last one for about three years, wtf.

Lowfront · Post by **Lowfront** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 8:30 am

knotkranky wrote:Ummm, I think Lowfront would like to know how to record "anything external" into Live.

Sounds like the dude needs a micPre or a little mixer regardless.

this is what I'm trying to get at

Came back to the forum a 2 days later and found this monster thread

thanks for the replies guys, I'm gonna look through it now.

well looked through it all and idk I'm still lost

I have this sound card

http://www.nulime.com/Creative-Labs-X-S ... Pro/p21591

could someone please just tell me if I can use my guitar with ableton without needing to buy any more hardware?

I don't care about high fidelity I just want to mess around!

thanks a ton!

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:11 am

Lowfront wrote:I have this sound card

http://www.nulime.com/Creative-Labs-X-S ... Pro/p21591

could someone please just tell me if I can use my guitar with ableton without needing to buy any more hardware?

I don't care about high fidelity I just want to mess around!

thanks a ton!

Sorry for hijacking your thread for a technical discussion. It just happened.

If you don't care about fidelity then just plug your guitar into the line-in jack, crank up the gain and start playing/recording. If the volume is still too low or sounding exceptionally dull then you need to use additional hardware. If you own a guitar-amp with loop-out you can plug the guitar into the amp and plug the loop-out into the soundcard. If you own a stomp-box aka guitar-effect-pedal plug the guitar into the stomp and plut the output of the stomp into the soundcard. If everything fails, buy a cheap DI-Box.

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:29 am

Tone Deft wrote:Timur - that link totally backs up what you've been saying. I'd still like to sit down and figure it out from a techie standpoint.

Yep, that link is right on the spot on what I learned about these things. I thought impedance bridging is common knowledge among technies.

The important sentence is right at the beginning:

Impedance (Z) is the resistance of a circuit to alternating current, such as an audio signal. Technically, impedance is the total opposition (including resistance and reactance) that a circuit has to passing alternating current.
A high impedance circuit tends to have high voltage and low current. A low impedance circuit tends to have relatively low voltage and high current.

For audio we usually want high voltage (signal strength) and low current because the audio-signal is voltage-encoded. So don't need/want the current coming from the guitar pickups, but only the changing voltages: voltage-level = audio-level, voltage-frequency = audio-frequency. With lower voltage levels we need more amplification and with more amplification we will hear more noise which is generated by flowing currents (electrons running through resistance).

There is one paragraph about cable-length as well:

A low-Z mic can be used with hundreds of feet of cable without picking up hum or losing high frequencies. A medium-Z mic cable is limited to about 40 feet without losses. A high-Z mic will lose highs and pick up hum if the cable exceeds about 10 feet.This high-frequency loss depends on the capacitance of the cable as well as the mic impedance.

Guitars are usually high-Z, so anything exceeding 10 feet aka 3m can redule the quality of the signal. Because of that special low-capacity cables are offered for guitars, though often their price is quite high. In fact the plugs on the cables have a capacity of their own, but with length the cable becomes the dominating factor.

There is one thing worth emphasizing when plugging guitars/bass into a line-input, which I didn't know or just forgot about myself:

But if you connect a high-Z source to a low-Z load, you might get distortion or altered response. For example, suppose you connect an electric bass guitar (a high-Z device) into an XLR-type mic input (a low-Z load). The low frequencies in the signal will roll off, so the bass will sound thin.
We want the bass guitar to be loaded by a high impedance, and we want the mic input to be fed by a low-impedance signal. A direct box or impedance-matching adapter does this.

So while the combination of pickups and cable can form a low-pass filter the wrong combination of impedances seem to form a high-pass filter. Who would have thought that you need to know so much tech stuff for such a simple thing as plugging a guitar into a computer?!

Simple answer remains: Use a HI-Z input or DI-Box/guitar-preamp and use a good cable (doesn't have to cost a fortune though, mine costs about 21 Euro/30$ and there are less expensive ones which are still good enough for most applications.

anyway, props for being on point the whole time and being cool. where did you learn all this? reading as a music geek or did you have some good work experiences?

My pleasure. I learned most of this from reading as a music geek, alot from various internet-sources, but some of these things are mentioned in manuals for mixers and audio-interfaces as well. I used to work for a company that both worked for television and had a big music-studio where I learned some of the basics as well (like impedance matching for maximum power transfer). Besides that I always was kind of interested in electronics and also learned quite alot in school (phsyics and chemistry lessons mainly). I really don't know much about electric-circuits anymore, though. So don't ask me about the schematics of a low/high-pass filter, I once learned it, but have forgotten these things now because I don't need them.

btw I pronounce your name like 'Timmy' in South Park. TIMUR!!

Hehe, my little sister uses to call my "Timmeeeey" exactly the way it's pronouced in south-park sometimes. But the correct pronounciation is more like "Timoore" or "Tim Moore".

Seyser Koze · Post by **Seyser Koze** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:44 am

Seyser Koze wrote:Not a mixer, a decent external soundcard with pre-amps on board.

you can go straight in via your onboard soundcard of course, but you'll find the results disappointing.

Applying the SISO rule, you need a decent soundcard designed for musicla instrument input to computers in order to hear decent results.

Back where we started eh?

Lowfront · Post by **Lowfront** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 10:46 am

Timur wrote:
Lowfront wrote:I have this sound card

http://www.nulime.com/Creative-Labs-X-S ... Pro/p21591

could someone please just tell me if I can use my guitar with ableton without needing to buy any more hardware?

I don't care about high fidelity I just want to mess around!

thanks a ton!
Sorry for hijacking your thread for a technical discussion. It just happened.

If you don't care about fidelity then just plug your guitar into the line-in jack, crank up the gain and start playing/recording. If the volume is still too low or sounding exceptionally dull then you need to use additional hardware. If you own a guitar-amp with loop-out you can plug the guitar into the amp and plug the loop-out into the soundcard. If you own a stomp-box aka guitar-effect-pedal plug the guitar into the stomp and plut the output of the stomp into the soundcard. If everything fails, buy a cheap DI-Box.

K but when I plug my guitar into the soundcard it sort of just does it own thing and plays over the speakers regardless of ableton running or not.

What would I need to do software wise to get ableton to "see" the guitar.

Thanks again guys

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 12:26 pm

Lowfront wrote:K but when I plug my guitar into the soundcard it sort of just does it own thing and plays over the speakers regardless of ableton running or not.

What would I need to do software wise to get ableton to "see" the guitar.

Thanks again guys

I suggest you to have a look at the manuals of your soundcard and Live.

If your soundcard comes with ASIO drivers then set both the soundcard and the Audio Preferences in Ableton to ASIO. Now arm an empty audio track in Ableton for recording and check wether you're getting an input signal (the volume meter of the track will show you wether there is a signal). Off you go. Everything else you need to look up in your manuals, it's too much to describe here.

Timur · Post by **Timur** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 12:56 pm

I put together a Live 7 set that compares a guitar recording (simple strumming on E mayor) on Line Input vs. Hi-Z Input and also compares a quality 3m cable vs. a budget 5m cable on both inputs. If you don't own Live 7 you can simply play the 4 wav-files from the "Samples" directory with your favorite application.

Consider that I'm no machine so I did not strum all recordings with the same strength, but I tried to make sure that average volume and peaks are consistent. The recording begins with the neck-pickup, then switches to bridge-pickup then back to neck. I'm strumming with the rough side of a white sharkfin plek (couldn't find my yellow one, but they are both medium anyway

), going back and forth between neck and bridge with the strumming hand.

Line-In was recorded through a M-Audio Delta Audiophile 24/96, Hi-Z was recorded through a NI Kore 1. Files were saved at 32-bit and then dithered down to 16-bit using POW-R3 before putting them together into a new project. If you insist that I should be using the very same interface for both inputs I can repeat the process, but I doubt that there will be much of a difference.

This should enable you to make up your own mind of how sound is affected by the different settings.

hiz_vs_linein_vs_cables project.zip - 6.98MB

tripp2k · Post by **tripp2k** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 2:19 pm

After reading the first page of this, I'm not sure if a decent answer will ever show up so I'll skip the time waste in 2-4 and give the OP an answer. Take a look at Line 6's Toneport UX1 or UX2...assuming you are okay connecting with USB. Look it up and read about it. Inexpensive, but it is an ASIO soundcard in and of itself. It works great with my limited Ableton setup. Ciao.

Recording Guitar in Ableton

Just mic your amp?