Never plug the guitar directly into your PC

[Jackswastedlife]

Hey people,

just felt like I should add a little warning redarding the recording of an electric guitar on a pc.
I don't think it's very clearly stated in the product-description. It says it doesn't work without the interface-cable, but there's some more important issue.
What it doesn't say is, that it most likely trashes your Hardware if you directly plug the guitar into your pc / soundcard / onboard-soundchip. Standard pc-soundchips are not made for interfacing instruments like an e-guitar. This is due to the soundcard's impendance, which is not dimensioned for recording a guitar.

Like I said, this is not an issue of the software itself, it is an issue of the pc's hardware-architecture.

So everyone, do yourself a favor and do not try it without the appropiate cable / mixer / interface / whatever.

Hope I saved the life of a few soundcards with this post :-)

Greetings and keep on rockin'

[Zolon]

From experience, you can (see that word there? Can. Not will.) fry your sound card. I have popped the chip (literally) on a few sound cards doing this with a bass. It is one of the reasons I went out and purchased a breakout box for my instruments.

The issue (simple terms) is that the guitar will try and pull as much amperage as it can in order to power the pickups.

If you have active pickups or a pre-amp built into the guitar/bass, it is generally safe.

[Viper78]

Tried it several times (line level & mic level), it won't hurt you soundcard. It isn't going to sound very good probably, but it won't damage a thing.

[Jackswastedlife]

Publicado originalmente por Davesteronerism:

Publicado originalmente por jackswastedlife:

Yeah, then you might have hardware that does support a guitar after all. That doesn't mean everyone is as enlightened and blessed as you are...
Plug your guitar into your MIC-input on an onboard soundchip, turn your guitar to 10 and see your chipset fly...
If you don't have anything decent to add to the discussion, other than bragging, then feel free to leave the discussion and stop trying to troll other people who might blow up their hardware...

First off, calm down this is just a discussion and I told you my real life experiences on the matter. Have you had a blow up by plugging your guitar directly in? Has anybody else here had a blowup by doing this? I'd love to hear real life experiences and you claiming to be an audio engineer means squat- this is the internet. I'm an astronaut when I'm not playing gigs in fromt of 50k people.

I'm not claiming to be an audio-engineer I'm claiming to be an electronics-engineer. If you don't believe that, then this discussion is over anyway. Btw. I don't know where you come from and if it's like that in your country (and I must admit I don't really care after all, because cities and countries don't add very much to this discussion), but being an electronics-engineer is not that uncommon, don't you think.
Yes, my onboard-chip died from plugging in a guitar 12 something years ago.
Sorry for my emotional breakdown, but what pisses me off is that if someone means good by giving people advice in forums / steam / anything, the first 3 pages you see are people going like "You're lying", "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥", "Haha, never happened to me", "Impossible". This applies to every advice you give anywhere and is increasing from year to year.
BEING ABLE to participate in a discussion doesn't necesseraly mean everyone HAS TO participate in it

[Dave's not here man]

I understand where you are coming from as people generally suck.

Person A: "I can't run this game it keeps crashing."
Person B: responds: "Well it runs fine for me! Does that fix your problem?"

That being said I tried using the onboard audio chip once and the lag was so bad it was zero fun trying to record tracks. I bought a cheap sound card, downloaded some ASIO drivers and it worked flawless. My friend records on his onboard audio laptop and just deals with the lag although that would drive me nuts. I'm not an expert and I'm not endorsing everybody to go out and do this, I'm just saying it worked without any damage in these situations.

[Gloomski]

Ehm..
First: How do you plug in a guitar to the PC? Do you use a jack-to-mini jack adapter?
Second: Why would you? Wouldn't it have the same effect as playing into the microphone - the volume would go up a bit?
I'm not trying to be an ass - just curious :)

[Jackswastedlife]

Publicado originalmente por JungleBooBoo:

Ehm..
First: How do you plug in a guitar to the PC? Do you use a jack-to-mini jack adapter?
Second: Why would you? Wouldn't it have the same effect as playing into the microphone - the volume would go up a bit?
I'm not trying to be an ass - just curious :)

Jep, I used a jack-to-mini-jack... and killed my hardware :D Right now I'm using a Alesis Multimix 4 + a condensator-mic --> USB-cable-to-pc. Works really nice.

With software like guitar rig 5, you can get some astounding effects, I might even go that far to say it sometimes sounds better than pro-studio-equip some professional bands use.
But what I realised is, the most important thing is not the software, but a decent hardware so the signal comes in as clean into the pc as it goes out the guitar.
Let alone that, you can record your stuff and use it as a backing track. For the only guy playing guitar in my family and friends, this can come in very handy :D

[Jackswastedlife]

Publicado originalmente por Davesteronerism:

I understand where you are coming from as people generally suck.

Person A: "I can't run this game it keeps crashing."
Person B: responds: "Well it runs fine for me! Does that fix your problem?"

Oh yeah, that's what I meant. Everyone wants to add something to any random discussion no matter how out-of-place or sometimes offending it is

Publicado originalmente por Davesteronerism:

That being said I tried using the onboard audio chip once and the lag was so bad it was zero fun trying to record tracks. I bought a cheap sound card, downloaded some ASIO drivers and it worked flawless. My friend records on his onboard audio laptop and just deals with the lag although that would drive me nuts. I'm not an expert and I'm not endorsing everybody to go out and do this, I'm just saying it worked without any damage in these situations.

Yeah, the lag between playing it and hearing it is insane from time to time. I'd suggest a good soundcard (Creative X-FI series works great) and a small mixer. I can record with ~9-10ms latency, where if I use my old setup with my onboard-sound I had like 70-75ms

[svm005]

jackswastedlife, thanks for letting us know. I'm considering buying this game and an e guitar and know nothing of things like this. I'm surprised that there's so much criticism and second guessing going on. Again thanks for the heads up, I'm definitely not taking that chance and will utilize that adapter.

[HooksNHaunts]

The likelihood of blowing up a sound card with a guitar is very slim...

It is not a good way to connect the guitar at all but still...

[Dr. Peter Venkman]

If you have active pickups this isn't a problem at all.

[cura666]

Publicado originalmente por jackswastedlife:

Publicado originalmente por Davesteronerism:

Wow guess I've been lucky because I've been 1/4" > 1/8" > soundcard for years and multiple PCs with multiple recording softwares and never once blew up or destroyed a sound card. Does your guitar shoot lightning bolts through the cable?

Yeah, then you might have hardware that does support a guitar after all. That doesn't mean everyone is as enlightened and blessed as you are...
Plug your guitar into your MIC-input on an onboard soundchip, turn your guitar to 10 and see your chipset fly...
If you don't have anything decent to add to the discussion, other than bragging, then feel free to leave the discussion and stop trying to troll other people who might blow up their hardware...

Eh?. I did it on several cards and guitars since 90's too. From original Sound Balster, through Sound Blaster Live, Audigy, XFI and on couple of integrated ones too. Before you reply with another nonsense - my addition to discussion is some first hand experience that may help find the couse of the problem.

[Zolon]

Sound Blaster 16 was the first one I blew up. The Audigy with the 5.25" breakout worked wonders, as it was actally designed for it. Laptop wise, I toasted the inputs (mic and in-line) on a Dell Inspion 8100, as well as a Dell 610. Every time it fried, was the same setup.. Passive Bass.. NEVER had an issue with an Active setup.

[nuclear7]

you have as much chances of frying your chipset with a guitar as you have with computer microphone. dont worry, do it to your heart countent. and find out how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ onboard soundchips are, and how bad you will need a good audio interface to produce anything audible

[♥๖ۣۜŔЄλvЭЯ♥]

Hey, if you went through the front port.. and it was not grounded properly to the case and power supply. Then it will fry something. I had this happen with a usb port on a pc before. It took the motherboard with it tho..

[StressLess]

So to summarize this thread - if you are a really unlucky screw-up who's angered the Gods of Rock or the Great Nerd in the Sky, or have very old, crappy equipment there is THAT snowball's chance in hell you MAY fry your sound card by hooking a guitar directly to one of the inputs, or if you have a grounding issue you might. If you have newer equipment that's not crappy or screwed up (and there's no grounding problems) then you are pretty much safe to hook that bad boy up and rock thru your computer speakers (NOTE- a bass guitar will likely fry your speakers, Rocksmith processes the audio so that it's safe, but most other software doesn't).

To address some urban legends I saw in messages in this thread, an "input" is just that, an "input", so a guitar will draw NO amperage from your sound card as an input watches the voltage being produced by a transducer (in this case, the guitar's pickups). So no, you will NOT fry your sound card because the guitar pulls too much amperage from it, because a guitar pulls no power from the sound card at all! If your guitar is screwed up, or your sound card is screwed up, then you may have a problem, though in normal usage there simply is no problem.

Secondly, a standard electric guitar is a high impedance source, meaning (in practical terms) that the output voltage of the guitar pickups is very low, while a guitar with active pickups is a low impedance source that produces a higher output level (and is why you turn down the volume on your amp when you have active pickups, low impedance = high output, while high impedance = low output). Typically a line-in on a sound card works with low impedance inputs, while a mic-in on a sound card will work with high impedance inputs. NOTE- the terms low and high encompass ranges of values, so you can have some devices that are low impedance devices but still have a higher impedance than another device; for another example, merely changing the pickups on your guitar can change the actual impedance of your guitar, though unless you go active it'll still be high impedance.

So, if you intend to hook your guitar up thru your sound card then ensure that all the equipment involved is working properly and there will be no problems. Make sure to hook the high impedance output of the guitar to the sound card's high impedance mic jack, and a low impedance active pickup or a preamp to the sound card's low impedance line-in jack. NOTE- if your equipment is NOT faulty, it should be safe to experiment with what hooks to what.

There you are...

James