How To: Recording an Electric Guitar or Bass without an Amplifier

Introduction

So, the main goal of this tutorial is to give a short and clear answer to the question "How do I record my Electric Guitar without an Amp?"

There is a technique known as direct recording which, is few words, is connecting your guitar to the DAW using an audio interface.

So the main issue for me is that I don't yet have a USB mixer or an audio interface that I can use to record the sound of my guitar, but wait a minute I do have a Zoom G 2.1U which happens to have a usb port that I can hook up to my computer.

Ok, so let go ahead an describe the process to record my guitar sound.


The connections schema:

My setup goes like this: From the guitar It run a 1/4 inch TS cable to the Zoom G 2.1U which, as stated before, has a USB connector, from there I run a USB 2.0 cable to my Mac, form the audio out of the Mac i run a stereo cable  which goes to the 5.1 Speakers set.

One thing you have to notice is that I am not using a power source for the Zoom G 2.1U, that is because the USB power will be enough to get the Zoom pedal running, just make sure the power switch is set to off on the Zoom G 2.1U.

So far so good, but I can't still hear anything coming from my guitar, next step is use a DAW so that we can actually hear and record the sound coming from the guitar.

Listening  and Recording our sound.
When recording or playing guitar sound using direct connection I use GarageBand, which is simple and flexible enough for what I intend to do.

First we mus tell GarageBand which is going to be our sound source, so:

Open preferences window: GarageBand  ->Preferences 
Audio/MIDI: Select desired input from drop-down menu, which in our case will be the Zoom G 2.1U
So, that's it for sound input.

For sound output, I do the following:
Open preferences window: GarageBand  ->Preferences 
Audio/MIDI: Select desired audio output from drop-down menu, in our case that'll be System Setting 

Once it is done we need to add a track in GarageBand. This track is going to be were we record the sound coming from the guitar.

Once we add a track we must choose the type of instrument the track is going to hold. In this case we can choose Electric Guitar, GarageBand will add some nice effects and an amp simulator to our track so that we have a start point.

Also we must notice that at left we have a drop down which prompt us "My instrument is connected with" we must make sure is says USB or we will not be able to get any sound coming from the guitar.

On the right side we have another drop down which prompts us what is going to be the output for the sound, System Setting will do the trick.

We can also choose on the bottom left if we want the sound we hear and record in mono or in stereo.

Finally and very important is the I want to hear my instrument as I play and record check box, which must be selected so that we can hear the sound of our instrument in the speakers system attached to the Mac

Then we click on Create and Voilà, we are ready to record our guitar sound without using an amplifier.

In closing, I must let you know that I use this method to record my guitar sound with a backtrack (usually Bass Guitar, recorded in the same way and a midi track with the drums), as you  can see in the image above, which so far has worked just fine for me. 

Also in the guitar track you can tweak your sound using the plugins provided in GarageBand or you even use an Amp  modeler software such as Amplitube, in that way you can try some of the most incredible Guitar Amps and stomp boxes.

Hope this small tutorial was useful. Good bye for now and good luck with this week's lessons.