LinuxMusicians

I have to record an chord progression with Ardour, any tips?

equipment: epiphone les paul, dmp 3 preamp, maudio audiohile, mic shure 58a beta

Yeah, mic your amp with an instrument mic.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Dec02/a ... uitars.asp

And how to mix it? The article names a few plugins:
low-pass filters
compression
eq

What are you plugins on GNU/Linux?

This is where thorgal knows the most. I don't know anything about it.

mmh I got some crasping sounds... mmhh... maybe I need a better jack plugin for my maudio dmp3...

I've been wondering the same thing in terms of recording a guitar. I'm going to be doing both a 6 string and a bass so I wonder if the same plugins can be used or if there's other plugins for bass that make a difference. By the way, that article you linked to is awesome. Great information in there for getting your feet wet on the whole process.

i usually just use direct mic input, as I do not have proper equipment to capture the natural amp acoustics via a microphone, not to mention that such microphones cost a fortune here in the Philippines, might as well I just buy a new guitar

to do it, i just use this handy 1/4 to 1/8 jack adapter and im all set.

(You probably won't need 1/4 to 1/8 jack adapter/converter if your soundcard has a 1/4 mic input)

I am using LADSPA plugins in Ardour as PreAmp simulators which I downloaded here > http://quitte.de/dsp/caps.html once you have them installed, Ardour automatically picks it up (including other apps that support LADSPA like Audacity). When recording bass, i usually use compressor and EQ to further shape the sound and apply it to the Bus which accepts the Bass input.. after recording, i do further tweaking on the recorded track.. bass IMHO is trickier to tweak because they tend to oversample (holds true for users like me with cheap sound card hardware)

I am also using PocketPod which has a wide variety of cabinet simulations I also employ. So far I am happy with the sounds I get.

In Ardour, I simply create one Bus which picks up the Capture, and a Track which records from the Bus, this helps me totally separate the guitar from my other tracks. I can apply plugins to the Bus, and apply more Plugins to the Track (after recording) for post processing.

One tip i'd like to share it enable the Editor Mixer (View -> Show Editor Mixer), it will appear in the left and will enable you to specify the input(s) per track and apply plugins to them. MultiTrack functionality is only useful if you separate inputs per tracks by the bus you direct them to.. anyways, i intend to write a very short quick how to on this during the weekend..

goodluck

If you decide to mic your guitar amp and not run it directly into your system I would suggest facing your microphone toward the flat side of the cone at an angel. Just think of the cone as being a "V" shape and try to face the mic towards the flat surface of the "V" shape or cone. That is the technique that I use when I mic my friends amp for recording.

I record my guitars mostly with an old Zoom GM-200. It was cheap when I bought it years ago and I am sure you can get it now even cheaper (stay away from the current Zoom G-Series pedals, they sound good with an amp, but with direct recording it doesn't sound good at all.) But I do get good sounds out of the GM-200 with the right settings on the unit. I use a little bit of compression, a little room and a little delay and it sounds fine.

My Marshall JMP-1 sounds fine with its Speaker emulation outputs if I have a good cabinet impulse in my effects chain to make it sound smoother.

I find most modeling units cheap sounding and not very dynamic. They can be dynamic with little gain, but most of the time modeling doesn't go well with moderate gain settings, I think.

studio32 wrote:I have to record an chord progression with Ardour, any tips?

equipment: epiphone les paul, dmp 3 preamp, maudio audiohile, mic shure 58a beta

To be perfectly honest: I dont really understand, where the problem should lie - you have very very good equipment at hand that should be perfectly capable to produce a very good guitar-signal. So as you have the one and only important thing at hand, you just need to record it on a track in Ardour and your done. Whit such equipment no further processing with any plug-ins should be needed.

At the other hand it depends on what you like to hear and I doubt, that the dmp will give you a real fat metal-sound. For this you would need a preamp made for guitar especially or you will need a virtual amp in your jack-system.
easy-to-use onestop amps are rackarack and guitarix. I used guitarix for recordings like this:

http://lapoc.de/demos/maria-katharsis-f ... 080709.ogg

it is quite straight forward and preserves the character of the pluged-in instrument and the playing very well.

For most of my stuff I use an amp, that I have made up from Tim Goetzes C*-Plugins hosted in AMS:
http://lapoc.de/spinoff-amsguitrack.php

This one i used for stuff like this:

http://lapoc.de/demos/lapoc-sos-ashita-141008.ogg
http://lapoc.de/demos/lapoc_sos_befallen-0709.ogg

It is more challenging to work with ams-guitrack but it preserves the special sound of my guitars even better

You can also record your amp directly with a mic. Given, you set up everything carefully, no processing should be needed either....

I usually use a pedal with some kind of cabinet simulation. The cabinet shapes the guitars sound which is why some DI'd guitars sound awful without that, especially with distortion (the famous 'wasp in a jam jar').

You can do this with guitarix if you have Audacity set up to use jack, otherwise use something like muse or Ardour & set up in qjackctl so that the signal goes, eg: line in to guitarix to ardour

I don't often use guitar but when I do, I record the clean signal while listening to the amp. Like that it is possible to later make invisible edits in the recording. Once complete, pushing this through effects, or back out to the amp/mic combo will mask any small remaining artefacts.