I have been having pretty good success going with the simple route and using an old stand alone Edirol recorder. The device is getting to be a little long in the tooth, but the record quality is fine for what I am doing and given that the samples are going to be mono anyway (thought the recordings are technically stereo). The connections on the recorder are starting to be inconsistent, so I will probably look for another newer Zoom or something and just keep with whole room recordings. It is working well to get it setup and then just record a bunch of content, some in time with a project, and some just random to be played with. Later I experiment sampling the recordings and keep what might be useful. Much simpler solution and more organic than what I had been thinking. I much appreciate that direction.
Iâve got a UA Dream '65 last summer and its been a wonderful interface for guitar and digitakt, with Heat mk2 in front of it for processing. The nice part of monitoring Ext L+R is a full stereo signal for the âliveâ guitar playing - a great little setup!
Edit: taking it a step further, monitor as individual sources and you can run two individual guitar players with the same amp settings. As long as the two guitars sound pretty different it works out really well!
Awesome that itâs working out man. Even if you get a zoom recorder, try and keep at it with the edirol and figure out which one sounds better when placed a bit closer to the amp and which one sounds better as a room mic, using them in conjunction and combining the recordings can give you a nice depth that you arenât expecting.
Once both recorders are running, lot of people do something like make a loud clap with their hands to have a cohesive point where both recordings can be synced up in editing software. If you still arenât comfortable with software this might not matter but in the future, try it out.
Anyway, good work and glad itâs helping you get something down and ended up being pretty simple for you to implement.
Do any of your loopers have USB connections or some kind of card (SD, CF, etc.)? Thatâs how I usually get my guitar into the DT quickly. It works well but itâs not a âseamlessâ processâyou canât really do it while performing.
But if youâre ok with setting up your loops in advance, then try this:
Set up the Digitakt to send midi clock and maybe transport stop/start info to your looper, so it can record âperfectâ loops in time.
Play a drum beat on the DT.
Hit record on looper and record your guitar into the looper, either direct into the pedal (âDIâ) or with a mic/amp combo.
Iâve been able to plug an SM57 and an MD421 directly into my looper and they work fine since theyâre dynamic and donât really need a preamp. Iâve even plugged my preamp in the looper to make piano loops (see photo at bottom of post), which would be a way to capture your amp sound.
Anyway, once youâre done playing, stop the looper, open it up as an HD on the laptop and drag the loops you just made from the looper into the DT thru Transfer. Done! Loops are in DT!
For reference, hereâs my setup for recording my piano into the DT, which might be similar to using an amp and your mixer:
Condenser mic goes into a cheap preamp,
which goes into the looper.
Looper is hooked up to DTâs midi clock so it can record loops in time with the song Iâm working on:
You can also use a version of this setup to just have the looper act as an âextraâ track or set of tracks on the DT.