New and have Guitar Input Question

[Jed]

Just got the Minibrute SE as a gift and am much more comfortable with guitars than keyboards so want to input audio from my strat.  After several conversations with Guitar Center folks I more confused than ever.  Their consensus is to use something like the Scarlet 2i2 preamp as an input device to run the guitar through to raise the gain.  Does this sound valid or is there an easier way?  If so, specifics would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for any input.
Jed

[dog01]

Hi Jed

I think you can use the following to boost the guitar signal: an active di box, distortion pedal, mixer plus if you have and audio interface you could alway use the outs of that instead of the scarlet, also there are settings in minibrute connection software to help adjust gain needed to trigger the minibrute you will want to  set the audio input (audio gate threshold) to low to get the best results hope that helps.

to get more info look at minibrute manual and google how to boost guitar signal, some other useful terms : di boxes, gain, line level input/output, instrument level input/output, and impedance http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan03/articles/impedanceworkshop.asp   

ps if you are interested in controlling vst and midi on computer  you can do that with your guitar and one of these  http://shop.lividinstruments.com/guitar-wing/

regards Dog01 

[Jed]

Thanks Dog01,

Later this week I'm going to pick up this, http://www.guitarcenter.com/Earthquaker-Devices-Arrows-Preamp-Booster-Guitar-Effects-Pedal-110464328-i3793969.gc, it should do what I want.  Thanks for the heads up on the minibrute software, I connected through the software and wasn't sure which gate threshold setting to use (low) for some reason, I was thinking high. 

Appreciate the link to the soundonsound site, will spend some time there reading through the material.  I've got a couple of books on analog synthesizers coming from Amazon in a few days so hopefully my knowledge base will grow appropriately.

As a side note, was watching the Werner Herzog movie Encounters at the End of the World last night and was amazed at the noises made by the indigenous seals.  Now I know some of the sounds I would like to emulate.

Jed

[BodoBrute]

Hi Jed,

if your guitar preamp has a line out, just connect it to the Minibrute. FX send is another option (in that case set the dry/FX blend knob to 100 % FX).

[Jed]

Did not have success with the preamp (Earthguake pre-amp mentioned above).  Did everything I thought was needed:  guitar into preamp, out preamp into audio in, gate set to audio in, line out to amp and internal software set to low threshold and......nothing.  Maybe I need to forget the guitar as an input for now and focus on getting some keyboard skills. 

Thanks for all the help, maybe I'll re-address this issue at a later date unless someone has a suggestion concerning what I might have missed.  Oh, and I did go directly from guitar through preamp into my amp and everything seemed to work so I know the pre-amp isn't faulty.