Can I plug in a dynamic microphone (sm58) or a guitar straight to the analog heat?

Title says it all, I’m about to buy an analog heat and I’m wondering if I need some sort of a pre-amp to gain the signal before it hits the heat.

You do.

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It may be possible, somebody should actually check this with their gear. I did it with Digitakt and it works for SM58 but the signal is somewhat noisy. Since that I bought little Mackie mixer with microphone input and it solved the problem. I would help you out and plug the mike directly to Heat but I just destroyed the required special cable (XLR to 2x TR) so no luck.

It would make sense to have XLR inputs and microphone preamps in Heat but I guess it would make it even more expensive (although I’m not sure if money is the argument in choosing the Elektron gear).

For audio we deal with mic level, instrument level, line level, and speaker level.
Each has a different voltage range and also a different impedance which is a characteristic of electrical flow…
The Heat and most electronic music devices operate at line level, a microphone is meant to be run through a preamp to be converted to line level. This can be an individual unit, a mixer, or an audio interface…

Plugging a mic into a line input you’ll most likely get very dodgy quality and vey low signal, like trying to power something from a mostly dead battery, it might work kind of, but nowhere near operational specs…

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Heat is stereo only(for now at least)

You should also be able to just plug into one channel, and take one output from it, if you wish…
(Through a preamp still)

I don’t have a heat but I don’t see any reason it would send audio from an input of one channel to the output of the other channel, or any reason it wouldn’t have an effect on just one channel…
Also I remember reading someone had it hooked up like this from a mono aux from a mixer…

You can probably run two different mono’s through it if your OK with using the same settings…
And like you say there’s plenty of ways to make a mono signal stereo and just plug in two cables…

The only thing in the heat that comes even remotely close to doing ”stereo” is the filter cutoff offset parameter, which makes the cutoff points unsymmetrical between L and R channels. For everything else, L in and L out will do mono processing, no problem.

However, WRT a mic into line level - Do it only if you like the resulting lofi sound. It is nowhere near ”engineering best practices” to go mic into line level, and it will never sound ”as intended”.

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I used to bring my SP404 to get Mic to line level… comes with a few options !
:wink:

I plugged my passive guitar straight into AH with input sensitivity set to max. It’s even better than Analog Drive, with certain settings.
Should be the same for a bass.

It’s possible to plug a mic, if you want dirty things.
Don’t expect preamp quality.

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