The Avid Eleven Rack is a hardware guitar amp simulator that’s great for quiet practice
or simulating a wide variety of different guitar amps in the home studio.
In this video series, we’ll go over how to use the Eleven Rack.
For this first video, we’ll go over connecting our Eleven Rack as an audio interface to our
digital audio workstation, recording with it, and re-amping a direct signal through
the Eleven Rack to re-process the guitar signal in a different way.
Before we get started, there are two versions of this that you can purchase.
One version is just the Eleven Rack on its own, and the second is the Eleven Rack with
a full version of Pro Tools.
I’ve linked both of those in the video description, so be sure to check them out if you’re interested
in purchasing one of these units.
Both of them are the updated Eleven Rack that works with the Eleven Rack Editor, and it’s
worth getting one of those instead of a used version which may still have the old firmware.
The first thing we need to do is go over the basic controls and jacks found on the front
and back of the Eleven Rack.
On the left is the power switch.
Then we have the volume knob.
This adjusts the volume level in our headphones, but it also affects the recorded volume level,
so we need to be careful of that.
The Edit/Back, Save, SW1 and SW2 buttons are used to navigate through the Eleven Rack menus,
and we’ll cover those in another video.
Down below we have 6 knobs we can twist.
These are used to control the various amp settings and effects depending on where we
are in the menu.
Active knobs will light up, and the color will change if the setting is different than
the preset and it’s unsaved.
The controls they’re mapped to will appear on the screen up above.
To the right is the scroll knob.
We will use this to navigate menus and make selections for the different settings we need
to change.
Beside that we have 8 buttons.
Most of them are for turning on and off different effects.
Each preset that we’re using with the Eleven Rack has a slot for distortion, modulation,
delay, reverb, and two additional effects pedals.
With these buttons, we can turn those effects on and off easily without having to go into
a menu.
The FX loop button activates the FX loop and this can be used with external pedals or effects
through the inputs and outputs on the back of the Eleven Rack.
On the bottom right, we have the tempo/tuner button.
If we tap this button, it adjusts the tempo the Eleven Rack is set to.
Some of the effects use musical time that locks to the tempo.
If we hold it down, we enter tuner mode to tune our instruments.
On the far right, we have connections for a microphone at the top, with a preamp level,
48V phantom power, and pad.
Down below we have the headphone output, output jack to connect the Eleven Rack to another
guitar amp, and the guitar input.
The back of the Eleven Rack has a lot more connections that we can take a look at.
First we have the FX loop for our pedals.
The sends go to the inputs on the effects and the return to the outputs.
We can set the level to rack or pedals.
Next is the main output, which we can use if we want to connect the Eleven Rack to a
PA system or monitor speakers.
Down below is the line inputs if we want to use it as an effects processor.
Then we have another output to the amp if we’re using stereo.
The MIDI and expression pedal are used to control some of our effects and change the
amp settings with a foot controller.
The AES/EBU and SPDIF connections are digital audio connections we can use to connect the
Eleven Rack to other audio devices.
Finally, there’s a USB connection which we need to record with the Eleven Rack, and
for another way to change the settings on the Eleven Rack quicker.
Before we can get to using this audio interface, the first thing we need to make sure of is
that the input is set correctly.
From the main screen, press and hold the EDIT/BACK button to open the options menu.
Use the scroll knob to select RIG INPUT and press the SW1 button to make your selection.
Then we’ll see that one of the knobs down below lights up, and this acts to scroll through
the various input options.
We need to make sure it’s set to guitar.
It should be set this way if it’s the first time you’re using it, but there are situations
where this input needs to be changed, and we’ll look at one of those situations later
in this video.
Once you’ve selected it, press EDIT/BACK again and exit the menu.
The Eleven Rack will now process that input.
Connect the Eleven Rack to your computer over USB and power it on.
The computer should be able to install the drivers for this software on its own.
Now go to your digital audio workstation.
We’ll set the audio mode to ASIO to reduce the latency and select the Eleven Rack as
our audio device.
The Eleven Rack is selected just like any other audio interface that we would enable
for our software.
Now that our digital audio workstation has our Eleven Rack detected, we’ll add our
tracks.
How we do this depends on the software, but I’ll be adding two audio tracks.
On the first audio track, I’ll set the input to the Eleven Rack’s direct input.
This uses the Eleven Rack as a direct box to record the clean guitar signal.
I’ll set the second input to the Eleven Rack’s stereo output, which will record
a stereo signal with the Eleven Rack’s amp processing.
Once that’s done, I can arm the tracks and record the audio for the guitar.
The reason we record a direct track with the processed signal is so we can use a re-amping
technique later on.
Otherwise, with just the processed Eleven Rack signal, there’s no way to undo the
processing and change it after.
In that case, to get a different sound, we would need to record the track again, and
we would lose the performance.
With re-amping, we can change the amp processing as many times as we need to, or we can even
use it to layer different amp sounds.
The first thing we’re going to do for re-amping is change the rig input.
This is the same thing we did a few minutes ago when we were originally setting up the
Eleven Rack.
We’ll hold down the EDIT/BACK button to enter the menu and go to Rig Input.
We’ll set the rig input to re-amp.
In our software, we’ll go to the signal routing for the direct guitar track and change
the output of that track to the Eleven Rack Re-amp output.
Now when we play the track, we should here it play with the new amp processing.
We can then arm a different track to record the Eleven Rack stereo output with the processing,
just like we did the first time.
Just don’t arm a track to record the direct signal again, since that’s not necessary.
Now just record the new track with the processing, and do this as many times as you need until
you get the sound you want.
When you’re finished, just make sure to set the rig input back to the guitar input
so there are no issues the next time we use the Eleven Rack.
Thanks for checking out this tutorial on the Avid Eleven Rack.
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