Ableton Forum

I've been messing around trying to record some guitar stems from my mate into ableton to mess about with. However, while I know the basics of audio routing etc in ableton I know next to nothing about guitars. I'm living out of boxes atm so only have a lexicon alpha soundcard to hand and I was running the guitar through it's instrument line, into ableton, and recording it. However the volume on the recording audio barely reaches -35db. Also the waveform comes up on live as if it should be stereo but theres no right side to the audio i.e. when i pan the record fully to the right, i can't hear any sound. So my questions are, should i use another soundcard (I've got an m-audio firewire knocking about) but if so do i need more cables. Or is there an easy way to remedy this. Anyone care to share how they record their guitars?

Cheers

guitars are mono, record as mono - the instrument in is only the left side, so that's why you are seeing that.

the low levels are fairly normal for an unamped and unpreamped signal - either use a signal booster (if your instrument in goes through the mic preamp, you can use its gain, but clean boost pedals work just as well, just like a real amp) or just deal with it, your amp sim probably expects a signal at about that level anyways.