If you’re ever wanted to record an electric guitar in the home studio, you may know there
are two basic ways to do this. Either by recording an amplifier with a microphone, or connecting
the guitar directly to the computer. Today we’re going to look at two of the cheapest
ways to get the guitar signal into your digital audio workstation for recording, processing,
and even practicing with amp simulation. Before we start, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and press the bell icon to make sure you catch all our new videos to learn more about home
recording. To be able to follow along with this video,
you’re going to need two things. The first is either an electric guitar, or an acoustic
guitar with a built-in pickup. The electric guitar will allow us to work with amp simulation
as well. The other thing we need is a way to connect the guitar to the computer. This
is either with a USB guitar cable or a cheap audio interface.
The USB guitar cable is the cheapest and simplest way to connect the guitar to the computer.
We simply have to plug in the guitar to the cable at one end, and connect the USB connector
to our computer. There’s a lot of cheap USB guitar cables available online, and they
are basically all the same just with different brands. We’ll link to some of those in the
video description, and they usually cost less than $20 around the time of making this video.
The audio interface is a little more complicated but gives us some more options. The guitar
plugs directly into the audio interface, then the audio interface connects to the computer
over USB. The audio interface will often have a button to put it into instrument mode, or
have an instrument input, that way it acts as a direct box and everything sounds as it
should. The audio interface can cost roughly twice what the USB guitar cable costs, but
gives us some more options. First, they’ll come with a ¼” headphone output to connect
your headphones to, with a volume knob and everything built in. These audio interfaces
usually provide a louder signal to the headphones than the built in headphone outputs on a computer
do as well. They also have a microphone input if you try to record a guitar or amp with
a single microphone. There’s many different audio interfaces you can use. The one we’re
using for this video is a Behringer UM2. This is basically the simplest and cheapest audio
interface you can get, and it only has a single microphone input and instrument input, plus
a headphone output. We’ll also link to those in the video description. Of course, if you
plan on doing more recording, you can get any audio interface you like with the features
you need, and there are some that even include 16 inputs for recording larger projects, especially
those that have drums. Regardless of which option you choose to connect
the guitar to the computer, everything from this point forward will be the same. To record
the audio, or practice the guitar with amp simulation, we’ll need a program to process
the audio. For this, I’m using a digital audio workstation called Cakewalk by BandLab.
This is a completely free digital audio workstation, and we’ve done a tutorial series on how
to use it, so I recommend looking into that if you’re interested.
We also need to install a driver to get this device to work. That driver is called ASIO4ALL.
Go to their website, download the software, and run the program to install it.
Within our digital audio workstation, we need to switch the audio driver mode to ASIO and
select ASIO4ALL as the audio device. Switching to ASIO mode instead of the default windows
sound modes ensures that our audio will be processed quickly so there’s no latency
or delay. Latency causes a big problem when recording or practicing guitar through headphones,
but these settings will avoid that. From there, open the ASIO4ALL driver settings
from within Cakewalk, and select the USB device, either the USB cable or audio interface as
the input, then your headphone output as the output.
Now save the changes and exit the settings. For more details on setting up ASIO4ALL, we
have created a separate video on the channel that you can check out, but it’s got some
very basic settings that are fairly easy to use anyways.
Create a new track in the digital audio workstation. On that track, select the USB input we created
in ASIO4ALL as the input for the track. Arm the track for recording and press the button
for input monitoring. We should now hear the guitar in our headphones as we play it.
We can now record the guitar sounding as it is, particularly if we’re looking for a
clean sound or it’s an acoustic guitar, or we can add
amp simulation. Adding amp simulation will make our electric guitar sound as if it’s
playing through a guitar amp, even though it’s only plugged into the computer. This
allows for direct recording without the need for an amp or other recording equipment. It’s
also a great way to practice quietly without disturbing others with a loud amp.
Cakewalk by BandLab has a built in guitar amp simulator called Overloud TH3. This is
basically a demo version of this plugin, but it’s decent enough to get started with.
There are also other free guitar amp simulation plugins available. We’ve got additional
videos going into detail on using Overloud TH3 with Cakewalk for electric guitar, so
be sure to check out those as well. Thanks for checking out this video on connecting
a guitar to a computer on a budget. If this video helped you out, don’t forget to give
it a like, subscribe to the channel, and press the bell icon to get notified whenever a new
video is released. You can also check the video description for products featured in
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