Pedals with Audio Interface?

Hi Alan,

I do this all the time. The interface is just a way to record what you want into your computer... into your DAW the digital audio workstation that is used to record your music.

While it shows in several videos and diagrams that you just plug your guitar straight in, treat the interface as the amp in your signal chain, with everything that normally occurs between your guitar and your amp still in place.

One thing to remember is that without an amp, your signal (the audio you are recording) will sound a little less interesting because it does not have an amp colouring your tone to give you YOUR sound. You can however download a program on the Native Instruments website called Guitar Rig Player. It is a free smaller version of their software that has several amps copied as emulations. They will be enough to get your sound back to how you like hearing it.

Good luck!

Short Answer:

Yes, and exactly the way you were thinking of hooking it up.

your pedals will mainly work best into a high impedance input like a guitar amp, if your interface doesn't have a "HI Z" or "Instrument" input or button then any quarter inch input are meant for balanced line level signals. Your pedals will work into this input but not every pedal will work as intended without a DI. A good work around is to put a buffer at the end into your TRS line level input though the signal wills till be unbalanced and may be prone to ground buzzing and other noise. You will also wanna watch your gain levels into an audio interface regardless of whether you going into instrument or line level or using a DI. I find recording too hot can cause modelling plugins to act a little funky and not sound like a legit amp. You can always ramp up the gain later assuming your signal to noise ratio is good, but if you hit the interface hard enough that the preamp and conversion is coloring the sound then no matter at what level you drive the recording into a modelling plugin it'll sound funny because your pedals are driving the electronics of the interface into subtle harmonic distortion that's going to be like another effect in-line. Try tog et the most neutral signal possible to your ears if you plan to do any virtual effect or amp processing later. Now if you just want a cool direct sound by all means try driving your interface's inputs with your effects chain!

I record DI guitar at home all the time with all sorts of effects, tis no big deal. Sometimes I use an active USB DI, sometimes a passive one into my soundcard's TRS inputs, other times I use the instrument input of my Eureka strip and I can then get some transformer coloration and use the opto compression and EQ if I want.... otehrtimes I will purposely mismatch impedances to shave frequencies off and get weird clipping artifacts, like running a rangemaster direct into a line elvel input, instant weirdness in a cool way.

there are a million free guitar amp plugins for your DAW of varying uality levels.... none of them are too shabby though. Guitar Rig Player is one options, yes, but you might as well do a google searcha dn download everything. Also, if you own a tube amp you can invest in what's called a reactive load and use the line out from that dummy speaker into the recorder and then just throw one of the million free speaker impulse responses over the recorded track to simulate a guitar recording that moved air. its a pretty good solution, though the better load boxes are pricey.