Guitar porn

[Sean Hayden]

Trying to decide on what to get myself for a birthday present...



or...

[Animavore]

3 more weeks added to lockdown.

[Scot Dutchy]

3 more weeks added to lockdown.

Have you met your Stasi street warden?

[Brian Peacock]

Plenty of time to practice the Ani.

Sean, how about one of these..?



It has cheese!

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

Paul Stacey, as recommended by Dan Steinhardt...



Ooff!!

[Sean Hayden]

JHS pedals look great. The muffuletta would give me several big muffs in one pedal. But I'm leaning towards something like Bias FX. Having so many amps and effects a mouse click away is very tempting.

[Animavore]

I have Bias FX 2. It's pretty cool. 40% off now too.

[Brian Peacock]

G'won Sean. You know it makes sense.

[Animavore]

Here's me just now playing over a country backing track for this week's first-take Friday challenge on Reddit where every week we've to record a solo on the first take over a different style of music. I'm using Bias FX 2 and a blues/country preset, slightly altered.

https://soundcloud.com/tom-byrne-514661 ... in-a-major

[Sean Hayden]

Cool. I've decided to go with it. I just picked this up:



I'm hoping it will be perfect for my kind of tinkering. I'll download Bias FX 2 when it gets here.

[Animavore]

Tell me more about your set up because I might be able to save you some pain.

Are you Mac or PC?

Laptop or desktop?

Are you using monitor speakers or do you plan on routing the sound the PC speakers?

Do you plan on using Bias FX 2 as a plugin in a DAW?



One tip I can give before you do anything else when you plug in your audio interface is set the gain on the audio interface itself right. There should be a light that goes green any time an input is made. If it goes red the gain is too high. Pull it back to just before it goes red. Hit the strings as a little bit harder than you normally would to make sure you definitely clear the line.

This stops clipping in your signal. You want your signal going in to be totally clean because you're going to be doing everything else to the signal after that.

[Sean Hayden]

Thanks for the tips. I'll just be running it standalone through a laptop. The machine is an older ROG ~2014 G750JM, and for this it'll be running Windows.

[Brian Peacock]

A good rule of thumb for digital audio is to have your input hovering around -12dB and peaking at -6dB. (Every 3dB less is half as loud again btw).

I had a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 for quite a while - same as the Solo but 2 hi-Z inputs on the front. Very solid, clean, no-bother, low latency interfaces.

[Animavore]

Focusrite are very popular. I use a Presonus Audiobox iTwo, though, because I don't play by the rules (and this is the only audio interface the music shop right next to me sells).