Hey guys, in this video we’re going to be testing out a USB guitar cable. This is basically
a ¼” to USB cable that allows you to connect a guitar to a computer for recording or using
amp simulation. In this video, we’ll see if this cable actually lives up to its expectations.
Before we get started, I want to mention that I’m using an OTraki USB guitar cable, and
I’ve linked to that in the video description down below, but they pretty much all do the
same thing. When I bought this cable, there were a few
questions I needed to answer. First is whether or not there would be a lot of latency with
this cable. Second is if I could actually use it with amp simulation. Third is if it
would actually sound decent and be useful for recording or practice.
When I opened this cable, I found it came with an instruction manual. All this said
to do was connect it over USB and enable it as a microphone for playback on the computer.
This basically creates a high latency situation and won’t allow us to properly use amp simulation,
so I don’t want to do that. Instead we’re going to setup this cable with a free digital
audio workstation and amp simulation software. For this video, we’re going to be using
Cakewalk by BandLab, with the Overloud amp simulation that’s included. If you want
Overloud to work in Cakewalk, check out our previous video on cheap guitar amp simulation.
The first thing we need to do is open a new project in Cakewalk. Then we need to go to
the Edit menu and select Preferences. From there, we need to setup ASIO4ALL as the audio
driver. This will give us a very low latency input and output that way there’s no delay
when we play the amp simulation. For ASIO4ALL, I’ve setup the USB guitar cable as the input
and the headphone output on my computer as the output. I’ve disabled all our audio
interfaces that are connected to this computer to replicate what most people using this cable
would be working with. For a more detailed look at using ASIO4ALL, check out our tutorial
on how to use it on this channel. Now that the audio devices are setup, we need
to get our input working and the input monitoring enabled. First set the guitar cable as the
input on the track. In my case, it’s the first ASIO4ALL input. Once that’s setup
you can arm the track for recording. When it’s armed, we should see the level indicator
for the guitar input. If we monitor the input, we can hear the guitar playing. Here’s what
that sounded like. Now we can add the Overloud plugin on the
track. Here we can select different guitar sounds. I’ll start with a clean sound.
Now here’s a distorted sound. Now that we can see the USB guitar cable is
actually working, let’s get back to my original questions so we know if this is worth it or
not. The first question is whether or not latency would be a problem. In my case, since
I set it up with the ASIO4ALL driver, there wasn’t any noticeable latency that made
it difficult to play, so it passes here. Second, we can definitely use the USB guitar cable
with amp simulation if we have it setup in a digital audio workstation, and everything
we did in this video is with free software, so it’s accessible to anyone. Finally, the
sound quality was decent, but it could have been a lot better. One of the major problems
I had was the signal clips with the USB cable, so you have to adjust the volume knob on the
guitar. This isn’t really ideal, and it was happening with my Strat, which is already
a fairly low output guitar. The main important thing though is that I
actually would recommend one of these cables to someone that just wants to use amp simulation
as cheap as possible. It does do exactly what it is supposed to do, but it is a little more
complicated to setup that the instructions tell us about. Other than that, for someone
that needs a little more control, or to also record a microphone, you could pick up a Behringer
UM2 audio interface for under $50, and that would do the same thing as well.
Thanks for checking out this video on using a USB guitar cable. If you’re interested
in getting one of these USB cables, check out the links in the video description down
below. If this video helped you out, don’t forget to give it a like, subscribe to the
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