| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: soundcard issues?
by Kaisersoze | 06/14/01 at 06:23:48
:-/Hello everyone
I have just started with PC recording.For the past few years I have used a Yamaha Md8,wich was alright but, I have a CD burner on my computer now and I want to record on my PC so I can eventually burn tunes onto disks.I have been plugging my Digitech 2101 into my mic input of my soundcard(riptide PCI) and recording onto Acid pro.Which works fine for clean,but whenever I put distortion on my guitar It comes out as if there is a tremolo effect when I play it back.almost as if the sound card cant reproduce it faithfiully.I knoiw my sound card sucks, it came stock on my computer,but is this something that can be tweaked,or remedied by using cakewalk,or other software?.I was also wondering if anyone could give me any advice on equiptment?.What is a Quality soundcard? is it worth(performancewise) spending the extra cash to get the best you can afford or what? I record mostly rock/ metal,and mostly direct.Also what kind of outboard gear ,compressors etc ?any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Subject: Re: soundcard issues?
by Harry | 06/14/01 at 06:49:05
Fine on clean, "tremolo" on distortion is something I can't explain. But presumably the output from the Digitech is line-level and is too powerful a signal for a sound-card mic-in, you should be using a line-in. Maybe you are just about getting away with a low output-level clean sound, but the distorted output level is having the expected effect (overdriving the mic input).
My sound card recommendation for starting out is the Soundblaster Live which is cheap for decent quality. I'm not familiar with the card you mentioned, but maybe its inputs are damaged now! The card line-in will work fine with the Digitech direct, but if you are going to record anything else (eg vocals) you will want a small mixer in between your sounds and your soundcard.
Software won't cure your "tremolo" problem. But do try to pick up a multitrack program such as Cakewalk, and look into plug-ins for effects. I much prefer software effects to semi-pro part-analogue effects boxes.
Subject: Re: soundcard issues?
by me | 06/14/01 at 06:57:34
I went on a hunt and read so much about all these cards people talk about, then I found a site, cant remember how now, but it had a write up on most of the popular cards(20). The answers were not too unalike. Im sure the price was very different, but out of all of them, the one type of card family that scored for no conflicts, easy to use, does most things was the creative live cards, why, because they love windows environment. You figure...no-one really knows the answer unless they have the money and time to test every card with every type of recording situation, and every type of multitrack recording tool out there